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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



RALPH WALDO 
EMERSON 



BY 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1907 

All rights reserved 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

J\U 22 I90r 

Copyn«M Entry 

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LASS CI XXc„ No. 

/GbS 7 I. 

COPY B. 



COPTBIGHT, 1907, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1907. 



NortoootJ $«gg 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 




EDITORIAL NOTE. 



f I ^HE trust of editing the following Correspond- 
ence, committed to me several years since by 
the writers, has been of easy fulfilment. 

The whole Correspondence, so far as it is known 
to exist, is here printed, with the exception of a 
few notes of introduction, and one or two essen- 
tially duplicate letters. I cannot but hope that 
some of the letters now missing may hereafter 
come to light. 

In printing, a dash has been substituted here 
and there for a proper name, and some passages, 
mostly relating to details of business transactions, 
have been omitted. These omissions are distinctly 
designated. The punctuation and orthography of 
the original letters have been in the main exactly 
followed. I have thought best to print much con- 
cerning dealings with publishers, as illustrative of 



iv Editorial Note. 

the material conditions of literature during the 
middle of the century, as well as of the relations of 
the two friends. The notes in the two volumes 
are mine. 

My best thanks and those of the readers of this 
Correspondence are due to Mr. Moncure D. Conway, 
for his energetic and successful effort to recover 
some of Emerson's early letters which had fallen 
into strange hands. 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 



Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
January 29, 1883. 



NOTE TO REVISED EDITION. 

The hope that some of the letters missing from 
it when this correspondence was first published 
might come to light, has been fulfilled by the re- 
covery of thirteen letters of Carlyle, and of four 
of Emerson. Besides these, the rough drafts of 
one or two of Emerson's letters, of which the 
copies sent have gone astray, have been found. 
Comparatively few gaps in the Correspondence 
remain to be filled. 



NOTE 

The main sources for Emerson's biography are James 
Elliot Cabot's Memoir and E. W. Emerson's Emerson 
in Concord. These, together with Emerson's works, 
afford the basis of the present volume, and for the 
use which has been made of them the author takes 
pleasure in thanking the publishers, Messrs. Houghton, 
Mifflin, and Co., who kindly granted the necessary per- 
mission. Other illustrations of Emerson's character 
and career are found scattered in the reminiscences of 
his contemporaries, particularly in the volumes by 
Conway, Ireland, Albee, Alcott, Haskins, Sanborn, 
and Holmes ; but these writers add little except detail. 
Two other small books deserve mention for their 
excellent rendering of Emerson's personality in old 
age, — J. B. Thayer's A Western Journey with Mr. 
Emerson, and C. J. Woodbury's Talks with Ralph 
Waldo Emerson. The Correspondence of Emerson with 
Carlyle and his Letters to a Friend, both edited by 
C. E. Norton, and other letters to Hermann Grimm 
and to a classmate, published respectively in the 
Atlantic Monthly, May, 1903, and the Century, July, 
1883, complete the list of sources. 

G. E. WOODBERRY. 
Beverly, Massachusetts, 
November 11, 1906. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I. The Voice obeyed at Prime 

II. " Nature " and its Corollaries 

III. "The Hypocritic Days 

IV. The Essays 
V. The Poems 

VI. Terminus 

Index .... 



PAGB 
1 

44 

64 
107 
158 
178 
199 



▼ii 



EALPH WALDO EMERSON 

CHAPTER I 

THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 

Emerson leaves a double image on the mind that has 
dwelt long upon his memory. He is a shining figure 
as on some Mount of Transfiguration ; and he was a 
parochial man. In one aspect he is of kin with old 
Ionian philosophers, with no more shreds of time and 
place than those sons of the morning who first brought 
the light of intellect into this world ; in the other he 
is a Bostonian, living in a parish suburb of the city, 
stamped with peculiarity, the product of tradition, the 
creature of local environment. One is the image to 
the mind ; the other to the senses. One is of the soul, 
of eternity; the other, of the body, of time. It is 
difficult to focus such a nature; to find the axis of 
identity ; even the ray of truth is here doubly refracted, 
on one side into ideality, on the other into incomple- 
tion, the meaninglessness of matters of fact, uncon- 
cerning things. But to Emerson himself his life was 
of one piece, and seemed so, because he looked on it 
from a point within, from that centre of integrity upon 
which his being revolved as a personal law unto itself. 
It is there that the mind must fix its insight. The 



2 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

" process of a soul in matter " was his biography. It 
is a singularly personal life whose overmastering in- 
terest is in the soul that lived it, not in events, not in 
the crisis of the times, not in circumstance, in family, 
in friendships, in nothing but the man himself, — a 
strangely isolated, strangely exalted soul who came to 
light in New England as other such souls have been 
born in out-of-the-way places on earth since the spiritual 
history of man began. And, as was the case with them, 
there was nothing out of the ordinary in his origins 
and the condition of his life ; he was, in all ways, one 
of his own people. 

He was born, May 25, 1803, in the old parish house 
of the First Church of Boston, on Summer Street, in 
a neighbourhood of gardens and open spaces of pasture, 
characteristic of a large rural town, not far from tide- 
water and not far from the State House on Beacon 
Hill. From this environment he never travelled far 
in the journey of his life. Heredity slept strong in 
the boy. There was the special strain of clerical selec- 
tion in his father's family, much dwelt upon, as if the 
seven Puritan ministers of this ancestry — 

" Were as seven phials of his sacred blood" ; 

but nature had laid a broader base. There was no caste 
in the old New England blood; the early stocks mingled 
and in any long-descended stream were one ; born in 
the seventh generation, Emerson derived from many 
sources and was of the kin, one of the children of 
Puritanism in that much inbred race, like Hawthorne 
or Phillips, drawing from the whole soil. He was a 
communal child. The religious element in him, so far 
as it was priestly and Levitical, was rather a thing of 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 3 

home-breeding than of physical heredity; and as he 
grew away from the church, he returned to an old 
wild virtue of the blood that was the blood of freemen. 
Upon the side of his mother, Ruth Haskins, his ex- 
traction was lay and practical. Her father, a good old 
man of energetic and religious habit, was a cooper and 
distiller, who traced his origin only one generation, 
while by way of amendment he left forty-six grandchil- 
dren. But, whoever were the many forbears, the boy 
was first of all his father's son, an Emerson ; he was 
never allowed in his growing up to forget that fact, — 
his fundamental duty in life was to maintain the name. 
Family pride was an important trait of old New Eng- 
land ; it was not dependent on wealth, past or present ; 
it was entirely self-sufficient. The Emersons had it. 
If, as their Aunt Mary, the family Sibyl, said, they 
" were born to be educated," they were educated to be 
Emersons. In those stern and uncommunicating pa- 
rental days, the tradition of life from father to son 
was perhaps most deeply felt by this spur and example 
of the blood. Emerson, in his opening years, naturally 
turned to his father's family and this line of ministers 
who were held up to him for admonition, — what the 
family had been ; he felt in them near and personal ex- 
amples of the Puritan ideal ; moral essence streamed 
into him from this family sentiment. Nor was this 
Puritan ideal, as it so touched the slim heir at the 
hearthstone, a narrow one ; it displayed a many-sided 
sufficiency for life in the new settlements. Perhaps 
none of these silent figures came so near to him, in the 
generosities of boyhood, as his grandfather William, 
the young minister of Concord who before daybreak 
of the fight encouraged his parishioners on the village 



4 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

green and could hardly be restrained from standing 
with them there, and soon afterward, joining the 
patriot army at Ticonderoga as chaplain, died of 
camp fever. 

Of his father, Emerson remembered little more than 
the grandeur of his funeral. Sixty coaches and the 
Ancient and Honorable Artillery, whose chaplain he 
was, followed him to the grave. This cultivated 
preacher, as minister of the First Parish of Boston, 
held an honoured position in the city. Preaching 
was to Boston the chief art and ornament of its life. 
The Puritans had brought it over in their ark ; it was 
the highest exercise of the chosen spirits among 
them, generation after generation ; and in their head- 
city on the three hills it ,had a history not unlike 
that of a fine art in more famous towns. The dog- 
matic force of Peter Bulkeley and the fiery vehemence 
of Father Moody — both ancestral strains in Emer- 
son — had gone by, with their rude and primitive 
traits' ; there had now come a more cultivated age — 
what the fashion of that generation would have 
called almost a Sophoclean hour — a time of modula- 
tion of voice and sweet temper in speech, of rhetoric 
and eloquence, within whose decorum was bred the 
good taste of a Boston parish. Decorum, indeed, held 
a place among the idols of the congregation as firm 
as in any ritualistic establishment ; so independent of 
creed and sect is form in religion when long prac- 
tised on any soil. The chief of these " golden-lips " 
was Channing, the flower of the art of Boston in his 
high pulpit, so inaccessibly cold in the body, so 
spiritually transporting when only a voice. There 
were other examples. Historically these men an- 



l] the voice obeyed at PRIME 5 

nounced the latter days of Puritanism : and if they 
put forth colours of the mind and heart that wrapped 
their little world with a quiet and sacred beauty in 
the solemn Sabbath stillness, it was an autumnal 
flame like that upon the Suffolk hillsides, and 
signalized the deciduous power of time. Old religion 
found in them its decadents ; orthodoxy spurned them 
as a sophist race, dissolvers of the ancient faith, 
rationalizers, mere moralists, for it is essential to 
mark the fact that Emerson was born into a culture 
already struck with mental death; he experienced 
in himself this dying away, in youth and early man- 
hood; and the core of interest in his life is how 
his soul lived on, and on what strength maintained, 
after that death. Of this race of Boston preachers 
was his father, William Emerson, fluent, clear, and 
polished in discourse, of social habits and literary 
tastes, a quiet moralist in the pulpit, no formalist, 
with the public functions natural to his position, the 
chaplaincy of the State Senate, the delivery of the 
Election Sermon; editor, too, of the Monthly An- 
thology, suggester and supporter of the first learned 
societies and libraries of the city. He filled his place 
and was of- his times, a bland and pleasant gentleman, 
a tolerant clergyman, handsome, tall, and fair, with 
tinted cheeks, welcome at dinners, in literary con- 
versations, on civic occasions, — a man of the cloth in 
those days, a Boston minister. But grandeur in the 
pulpit is nigh to week-day dust, and the intellectual 
life in that democracy was not exempt from its eternal 
law of earning only living wages ; and dying at the 
age of forty-two, the minister left his family to a 
period of trust in Providence — a normal condition 



6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

for Emersons, whatever the dispensation — tempered 
by an allowance from the parish of five hundred 
dollars annually for seven years. 

In that simple community such a change of fortune 
was not in itself remarkable ; the early death of the 
father of a family was necessarily such a catastrophe. 
The burden fell upon the mother ; the boys would 
grow up and in time things would again fall into 
comfortable order; life went on in this hope. The 
boys in this case were five, — William, Ealph, Edward, 
Bulkeley, and Charles; Bulkeley was mentally de- 
ficient, and was cared for all his life ; there was 
also a baby-sister. Two children had previously died. 
William, the eldest surviving, was ten, and from an 
early age, and prematurely for a child, shared with 
his mother the responsibility and strain of their 
straitened means. She impressed her friends most 
by the serenity of her mind ; she was at work early 
and late, firm in discipline and undemonstrative of 
her affections, though her smile is recalled, of good 
and sensible speech, soft in her manners, and in her 
demeanour characterized by a quiet dignity. She took 
in boarders. The object of the family life was to live 
and educate the boys. Emerson, then eight, was sent 
to the public grammar school ; his education had be- 
gun at the age of two, at a dame-school, and just before 
he was three his father had remarked that he did not 
read very well ; at ten he entered the Latin School. 
The other boys were at their several stations in the 
same career. The household was firmly knit together, 
with peculiarly close ties between the brothers, owing 
to the sympathies bred in the identity of their ideal of 
the future and the isolation of their self-help. They 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 7 

were all ministers in embryo. They lived frugally 
and were trained to habits of going without ; to serve 
God when man-grown, and finally provide for the 
family was their dearest hope ; they were bred in the 
thought of it. They helped their mother at home as 
much as they could, and at one time cared for the 
vestry, but they do not seem to have earned much in 
boyish ways: two of them shared a winter coat be- 
tween them, jeered at, it is said, by other boys. Once 
Emerson, having spent six cents on a novel from a 
circulating library, and being chided by his Aunt Mary 
for such an expense when it was so hard for his 
mother to obtain the money, heeded the appeal, and 
he recalled the anecdote because he had never finished 
the novel. These are trifles that show the life of 
years. Yet the Emerson household should not be 
thought of as, in its kind, an unusual family group. 
There were scores of such homes in old New England 
then and in later days, with just such a scholastic 
strain in them, such moral ambition and similar 
hardships. 

When Emerson was eleven, his little sister died. It is 
on the morning after her death that his childish figure 
is first clearly seen. He read the Scriptures at family 
prayers, and, it is related, prayed " with a grave and 
sweet composure." He was then the " spiritual-look- 
ing boy in blue nankeen," a homely garb, that a school- 
mate photographed on his memory. The habits of 
the family were, of course, pious. There were morn- 
ing prayers, in conducting which, as on this occasion, 
the children joined ; after supper they said hymns 
and chapters, and Saturday night was kept as a Sab- 
bath season. Emerson records the history of a day's 



8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

doings at this time. He rose at six, made the fire, set 
the table for prayers, and joined the other children in 
a spelling lesson before breakfast ; Latin School fol- 
lowed till eleven, writing school till one, dinner, Latin 
School at two, errands after school and chores, supper, 
hymns and chapters, and reading round in turn Kol- 
lin's history ; then private devotions at eight, ending 
the day. This was a scheme of work and duty fitted 
to boyish years and quite in the manner of the com- 
mon life of the old time in homes of family religion. 
Whatever interval was left for play, duty was engross- 
ing. In such conditions boys matured early and with 
precocious moral ambition if their temperaments re- 
sponded to the call. 

The fibre of these boys was toned and toughened 
by their Aunt Mary, a sister of their father, who in 
Emerson's later judgment was an incomparable bless- 
ing in their education ; she was their goad. At that 
time forty years old and single, she was in the habit 
of visiting her relatives, a welcome, but not too long 
welcome, guest. She had a strong mind well practised 
in hard reading, and her monomania with respect to 
the shroud had not reached that extreme which after- 
ward made her such a whimsical figure in the streets 
of Concord and in the thoughts of her kindred. She 
was of a type of lone women not unknown elsewhere 
in New England — a type that only Scott's hand could 
make relive — a stern enthusiast attended by a malady 
of poverty, solitude, and fervour. She had a passion of 
admiration for genius, for moral and intellectual suc- 
cess, and she made herself a sitter by the hearth of 
these boys, ambitious for their distinction, fierce and 
jealous for their excellence, a continual incitement to 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 9 

every task of mind or character. " Always do what 
you are afraid to do" was her best-remembered 
maxim; and all her sayings Emerson described as 
" high counsels.'"' When bread failed, she was found con- 
soling the boys with stories of heroic endurance. It is 
a homely picture of common life, and doubtless its set- 
ting was ordinary and humble ; but the Spartan trait, in 
however half-ludicrous vesture, as befits divine things 
sojourning on earth, was there. It is noteworthy that 
these boys grew up wholly under the hands of brave 
women, though with some external assistance from 
good men. 

The good man in particular was Dr. Ezra ftipley, 
minister of Concord and second husband of their 
grandmother Emerson. In the earlier years the con- 
nection of their mother with her own family was close, 
especially with her youngest brother, Kalph, for whom 
Emerson was named. Before her husband's death the 
family festivals were kept on that side of the house ; 
Thanksgiving united all at her home, Christmas at 
her father's, New Year's and Twelfth Night at a 
brother's and a sister's. But her father died in 1814, 
commemorated in heroic verse by his grandson aged 
twelve ; and though frequent intercourse was kept up 
and affectionate relations were maintained, as time 
wore on intimacy ceased on that side. It was in 1814, 
after her father's death and in the time of the 
distresses of the war with England, which pressed 
heavily on the entire community, that the Concord 
connection began to be close. Want had never been 
far away from the family. There was some occasion 
for prompt action. Dr. Eipley, a substantial citizen- 
minister of the old school, took the entire family home 



10 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

with him to the Old Manse which their grandfather 
William had built. Here the boys had schooling, in- 
terspersed with declamations on barrel-heads in the 
country store and romps in Peter's Field. They re- 
turned to Boston, to boarders and the Latin School, 
the next year, the doctor sending a cow along with 
them — the one which Emerson is remembered as 
driving down Beacon Street along by the Common to 
an adjoining pasture. 

Emerson was a home boy. The life of the brothers 
was contained within the family ; it had no external 
side that is salient in any one's recollections. There 
were no chums, no adventures, no foray into nature with 
boat and rifle. He was never given to games, to free- 
masonries of the playground and the street, or to any 
intimacy with one not of his own blood ; to these 
things and what comes of them he was all his life a 
stranger. He stood aloof, not wilfully but naturally. 
As a child he had watched the rough boys from Round 
Point go up to customary frays with " West Enders " 
on the Common ; but he never went out to battle; he 
seems to have had some timidity about town boys, and 
gives this as the reason for his never owning a sled, 
and his only appearance resembling warfare was on 
the occasion when he went with the whole school to 
Noddle's Island to assist in throwing up intrench- 
ments against a threatened descent of the British fleet. 
He swam, his father having, much to his terror, forced 
him occasionally off a wharf into salt water; he 
first learned to skate as well as to smoke at college. 
He and his brothers were absorbed in their chores and 
books, and fraternally in each other. " I can as little 
remember," says Dr. Furness, who knew him from the 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 11 

nursery, " when he was not literary in his pursuits as 
when I first made his acquaintance." 

It was a boyhood of study ; education was the one 
gift sought ; and whether in Boston or at Concord, at 
school or in the country store, in their home attic or 
in their grandfather's barn, the true sport of these 
boys was literature. They were bred on it. They 
read, of course, good authors and improving works ; 
but what most attracted them was the form of good 
writing. The first awakening of their minds was to a 
perception of rhetoric and to the sonorousness of de- 
clamatory poetry and to the poise of prose. It is said 
that schoolboys then went wild over the turn of a 
phrase, the fall of a period. They all heard atten- 
tively many sermons, and it is true that the church was 
an early, long-continued, and efficient school of literary 
expression in the community, and boybood shared in 
this benefit. A certain enthusiasm even might be im- 
bibed for the things of eloquent discourse ; such was the 
air of the city and the tone of life there. Oratory flour- 
ished, it should be remembered, in the same age in which 
the literature of Boston was produced. The minds of 
Boston boys were excited by the grace of spoken words 
as well as by books ; rhetoric was not a school-exercise, 
but a live art, and poetry was for this group of boys a 
higher rhetoric. Emerson was only a fair scholar, as 
the phrase is used of schoolboys ; but in this happy 
environment he early developed a spontaneous literary 
faculty, and he had taken to rhyming more quickly 
than to prose. At ten he composed a heroic poem, 
Fortus, which Dr. Furness illustrated ; he wrote verses, 
and declaimed them, on the naval victories of the 
war; and he commonly interlarded his letters to his 



12 RALPH WALDO EMEKSON [chap. 

brothers with doggerel. They took pride in him as 
the rhymer of the family. If their boyhood was lim- 
ited on the ruder side, they had an abundant life in their 
own way, and did not differ from their mates except 
that being piously bred and poor and not gregarious, — 
minister's sons, — some things were omitted from their 
havings ; in other things they were the same. They 
spelt and ciphered and had catechism; they piled 
wood in the yard, like all New England boys ; they 
waited at the meeting-house door to see if their favour- 
ite, Edward Everett, would preach there or elsewhere ; 
they read novels if they could get them ; and they had 
a peculiar proud carriage of the head, a hereditary trait. 
Emerson concentrated this life of the brothers and 
borrowed its colours for the generalized picture that he 
drew of such a group — a passage which by its old- 
fashioned movement and antiquated tone, as much as 
by its details, takes us back into a vanished world, to 
the heart of the thoughts and habits and ideal of his 
people as well as to his own childhood : — 

"Who has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a 
low roof, the eager, blushing boys discharging as they can 
their household chores, and hastening into the sitting-room 
to the study of to-morrow's merciless lesson, yet stealing time 
to read one chapter more of the novel hardly smuggled into 
the tolerance of father and mother, — atoning for the same 
by some passages of Plutarch or Goldsmith ; the warm sym- 
pathy with which they kindle each other in school-yard 
or barn, or wood-shed, with scraps of poetry or song, with 
phrases of the last oration or mimicry of the orator ; the 
youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons ; the school 
declamation, faithfully rehearsed at home, sometimes to the 
fatigue, sometimes to the admiration, of sisters ; the first soli- 
tary joys of literary vanity, when the translation or the theme 
has been completed, sitting alone near the top of the house ; 



i.J THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 13 

the cautious comparison of the attractive advertisement of 
the arrival of Macready, Booth, or Kemble, or of the dis- 
course of a well-known speaker, with the expense of the 
entertainment; the affectionate delight with which they 
greet the return of each one after the early separations 
which school or business requires ; the foresight with which, 
during such absences, they hive the honey which oppor- 
tunity offers, for the ear and imagination of the others ; and 
the unrestrained glee with which they disburden themselves 
of their early mental treasures when the holidays bring 
them again together ? What is the hoop that holds them 
staunch? It is the iron band of poverty, of necessity, of 
austerity, which, excluding them from the sensual enjoy- 
ments which make other boys too early old, has directed 
their activity into safe and right channels, and made them, 
despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beautiful, and 
the good. Ah, short-sighted students of books, of nature, 
and of man ! too happy could they know their advantages, 
they pine for freedom from that mild parental yoke ; they 
sigh for fine clothes, for rides, for the theatre, and premature 
freedom and dissipation which others possess. Woe to 
them if their wishes were crowned ! The angels that dwell 
with them, and are weaving laurels of life for their youthful 
brows, are Toil and Want and Truth and Mutual Faith." 

The period of home-education was followed by one 
of college years and school-keeping; for fourteen 
years one or two of the brothers were always in col- 
lege, and teaching was the family means of support. 
Emerson entered Harvard in the fall of 1817, in his 
fifteenth year. William had gone three years before, 
and on graduating in 1818 taught one season at 
Kennebunk in Maine and then set up a school for 
young ladies in Boston in his mother's house. He 
was the head of the family, a plain, dutiful, capable 
boy, the prop of the home. The cost of Emerson's 
education was eased in various ways, and the expenses 



14 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

were, of course, small. He was appointed President's 
Freshman, or messenger, which gave him lodging in 
Wadsworth House, the President's residence. He 
tutored the first year, and taught in vacation at his 
uncle Rev. Samuel Ripley's school at Waltham. He 
received aid from the Saltonstall and Penn founda- 
tions. In his Sophomore year he was appointed to 
wait on table in the Junior Hall, which excused him 
from three-fourths of the cost of board. " I do like 
it and I do not like it," he wrote to William, " for 
which sentiments you can easily guess the reason." 
He felt his dependent situation, and was warned by 
his Aunt Mary against indulging this feeling. How 
it affected his bosom thoughts and quickened his in- 
stincts is seen in a letter of his Freshman year to 
William : — 

" Just before I came from Boston Mr. Frothingham sent 
mother a note containing twenty dollars, given him ' by a 
common friend ' for her, with a promise of continuing to 
her ten dollars quarterly for the use of her sons in college ; 
not stipulating the time of continuance. At this time the 
assistance was peculiarly acceptable as you know. It is in 
this manner, from the charity of others, mother never has 
been, and from our future exertions I hope never will be, in 
want. It appears to me the happiest earthly moment my 
most sanguine hopes can picture, if it should ever arrive, to 
have a home comfortable and pleasant, to offer to mother ; 
in some feeble way to repay her for the cares and woes and 
inconveniences she has so often been subject to on our 
account alone. To be sure, after talking at this rate, I have 
done nothing myself ; but then I've less faculties and age 
than most poor collegians. But when I am out of college I 
will, Deo volente, study divinity and keep school at' the same 
time, — try to be a minister and have a house." 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 15 

Emerson was regarded as the least promising of the 
brothers, and he had the least successful college 
career ; he was not especially noticed, either at school 
or college, by his teachers or his classmates. On his 
own side, he did not look back on college studies as 
very profitable things, and he habitually wrote slight- 
ingly of collegiate education in later life. It was this 
view on which he acted as a student. "To tell the 
truth," he writes to William, " I do not think it neces- 
sary to understand mathematics and Greek thoroughly 
to be a good, useful, or even great man." His old 
Latin School master, concerned for his boys, visited 
him in his room to remonstrate with him on his defi- 
ciencies in mathematics, in which he says he was always 
a " hopeless dunce." He did not succeed too well with 
philosophy, that is, Locke, Stewart, and Paley. The 
truth is, he indulged his vein, — that native truancy of 
mind which first disclosed itself in the "idle books 
under the bench at the Latin School." Colleges never 
change ; and Emerson was as homeless as his kin 
have always been in college halls. The only school 
in which poets ever came to their own was Plato's 
Academy. He tried to do his duty by his studies, 
but it was against the grain. There were some allevi- 
ations. He was fortunate in having Edward Tyrrel 
Channing as his instructor in rhetoric the last two 
years, and he heard and carefully noted the lectures 
of George Ticknor. The best of his education he 
gave to himself in rambling reading and incessant 
practice in writing, and by that note-book in which 
from his Junior year he began the process of storing 
thoughts, phrases, suggestions, horoscopes of essays 
and paraphrases of reading, for future use ; and, doing 



16 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

this, his successes were in the line of his talent. He 
took a Bowdoin prize in his Junior year on The 
Character of Socrates, and a second prize in the Sen- 
ior year on The Present State of Ethical Philoso- 
phy, to the surprise of his teachers ; and he also 
took a Boylston prize for declamation. He sent the 
money for this proudly home, hoping "his mother 
would buy a new shawl" with it, but William assigned 
it to the baker. Perhaps at the bottom of his heart 
he hoped this little success would seem some amends 
for his deficiencies, and so he devoted it to her. He 
graduated not far from the middle of the class in 
rank. Summing it up, he said, — "A chamber alone, 
that was the best thing I found at college." 

Outside of his studies he is seen in the brief annals 
of his class, and as an unimportant figure in their 
memories, coming up to the groups of students with 
his President's messages or in walks to Mount Auburn 
with a friend, or in talks with the same friend in his 
Freshman room, where he had a volume of Montaigne, 
a set of Shakespeare, Swift, Addison, Sterne — books 
probably brought from his father's library. In his 
three later years he roomed at 5, 15, and 9 Hollis with 
his classmates, Dorr and Gourdin, and his brother 
Edward, in turn. He was younger than most of 
his class, a slender, grave boy, not physically vigor- 
ous ; he was not popular, though well liked, and he 
was not a conspicuous member. He was of a sluggish 
nature, and reserved; he had as a child among his 
brothers a vein of silliness with which he reproached 
himself, but he had none of the older playfulness of a 
college student, though as a listener he was not averse 
to merriment and stories; he did not bashfully or 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 17 

sourly withdraw himself from his fellows, but rather 
tried to overcome the barriers of his na f ure. He 
declared lifelong, that his isolation which he felt from 
his boyhood was not wilful, but inevitable — " my 
doom to be solitary." He had, even then, boy that he 
was, the hesitating courtesy of address that marked 
his demeanour through life. He was neither shy nor 
proud, he was slow. He was one of the group that, 
after a Sophomore rebellion had unified the class, 
organized the Conventicle Club for cheer and comrade- 
ship, and he was a member of the Pythologian Society 
which held weekly debating and literary exercises, 
followed by a supper at a total expense of two dollars ; 
he professed to remember the Malaga from the Cam- 
bridge grocer's as the best wine he had ever drunk, 
though instead of finding in it a solvent with his 
companions he " grew graver with every glass." He 
wrote a long serious poem for this Society, and an ode 
for a convivial college occasion. He had also, early 
in the course, helped to establish a Book Club, which 
bought Reviews not afforded by the college library and 
novels, of which Scott's were read aloud. His class 
was not more clairvoyant of the future than were the 
college authorities ; they made him Class Poet, but 
only after seven others had refused the post. It was 
to this happier, later period of college life that he 
referred when, a year after, he wrote, " I was then 
delighted with my recent honors, traversing my 
chamber, flushed and proud of a poet's fancies and 
the day when they were to be exhibited ; pleased with 
ambitious prospects, and careless because ignorant 
of the future." Except that other " peculiar pursuit," 
to which he more solemnly looked forward, poetry was 



18 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

the most dearly cherished in his solitude. It was, 
after all, the boyish rhymester that had most lived on 
in him through the four years. He was so disap- 
pointed at not being allowed a poetical part at Com- 
mencement that, it is said, he neglected the part assigned 
to him, a defence of Knox, and delivered it only with 
much prompting and little to his credit. So ended 
college for him ; schoolboy self-apology and penance 
for tutors' tasks, vagrancy in English books, and 
pleasant country strolls in study hours were his most 
lasting memories of Harvard. 

The only live colour in these college days that re- 
mains to us is Emerson's own account of his adoration 
of Edward Everett. It was an idolatry ; " the Idol " 
was the name by which Everett was known in the 
boys' jargon. Emerson was laughed at for his enthu- 
siasm, but he did not mind. The passage incidentally 
discloses the state of the Boston atmosphere in which 
the commonplace of those early years had its unseen 
background and rounded into a world; the "Athe- 
nian" style, too, contains the drop of time and cir- 
cumstance, the weather-stain of contemporary life. 
What modern pen could preserve these old perspec- 
tives without some vein of irony? Though anti- 
quated, the sketch is characteristic of a culture, and 
though written with the cold criticism of maturity, it 
has, nevertheless, gleams and flashes that take us 
straight to the boy's heart : — 

"Germany had created criticism in vain for us until 
1820, when Edward Everett returned from his five years in 
Europe, and brought to Cambridge his rich results, which 
no one was so fitted by natural grace and the splendor of 
his rhetoric to introduce and recommend. He made us for 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 19 

the first time acquainted with Wolff's theory of the Ho- 
meric writings, with the criticism of Heyne. The novelty 
of the learning lost nothing in the skill and genius of his 
relation, and the rudest undergraduate found a new morn- 
ing opened to him in the lecture-room of Harvard Hall. 

" There was an influence on the young people from the 
genius of Everett which was almost comparable to that of 
Pericles in Athens. He had an inspiration which did not 
go beyond his head, but which made him the master of 
elegance. If any of my readers were at that period in 
Boston or Cambridge, they will easily remember his radiant 
beauty of person, of a classic style, his heavy large eye, 
marble lids, which gave the impression of mass which the 
slightness of his form needed ; sculptured lips ; a voice of 
such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance, that, 
although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beau- 
tiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The 
word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, 
became current and classical in New England. He had a 
great talent for collecting facts, and for bringing those he 
had to bear with ingenious felicity on the topic of the mo- 
ment. Let him rise to speak on what occasion soever, a fact 
had always just transpired which composed, with some other 
fact well known to the audience, the most pregnant and 
happy coincidence. It was remarked that for a man who 
threw out so many facts he was seldom convicted of a 
blunder. He had a good deal of special learning, and all his 
learning was available for purposes of the hour. It was all 
new learning,' that wonderfully took and stimulated the 
young men. It was so coldly and weightily communicated 
from so commanding a platform, as if in the consciousness 
and consideration of all history and all learning, — adorned 
with so many simple and austere beauties of expression, and 
enriched with so many excellent digressions and significant 
quotations, that, though nothing could be conceived before- 
hand less attractive or indeed less fit for green boys from 
Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, with their 
unripe Latin and Greek reading, than exegetical discourses 
in the style of Voss and Wolff and Ruhnken, on the Orphic 



20 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

and Ante-Homeric remains, — yet this learning instantly 
took the highest place to our imagination in our unoccupied 
American Parnassus. All his auditors felt the extreme 
beauty and dignity of the manner, and even the coarsest 
were contented to go punctually to listen, for the manner, 
when they had found out that the subject-matter was not 
for them. In the lecture-room, he abstained from all orna- 
ment, and pleased himself with the play of detailing erudi- 
tion in a style of perfect simplicity. In the pulpit (for he 
was then a clergyman) he made amends to himself and his 
auditor for the self-denial of the professor's chair, and, with 
an infantine simplicity still, of manner, he gave the reins to 
his florid, quaint, and affluent fancy. 

" Then was exhibited all the richness of a rhetoric which 
we have never seen rivalled in this country. Wonderful 
how memorable were words made which were only pleas- 
ing pictures, and covered no new or valid thoughts. He 
abounded in sentences, in wit, in satire, in splendid allusion, 
in quotation impossible to forget, in daring imagery, in 
parable and even in a sort of defying experiment of his 
own wit and skill in giving an oracular weight to Hebrew 
or Rabbinical words — feats which no man could better 
accomplish, such was his self-command and the security of 
his manner. All his speech was music, and with such 
variety and invention that the ear was never tired. Espe- 
cially beautiful were his poetic quotations. He delighted in 
quoting Milton, and with such sweet modulation that he 
seemed to give as much beauty as he borrowed ; and what- 
ever he has quoted will be remembered by any who 
heard him, with inseparable association with his voice and 
genius. He had nothing in common with vulgarity and 
infirmity, but, speaking, walking, sitting, was as much aloof 
and uncommon as a star. The smallest anecdote of his be- 
havior or conversation was eagerly caught and repeated, 
and every young scholar could recite brilliant sentences 
from his sermons, with mimicry, good or bad, of his voice. 
This influence went much farther, for he who was heard 
with such throbbing hearts and sparkling eyes in the lighted 
and crowded churches, did not let go his hearers when the 
church was dismissed, but the bright image of that eloquent 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 21 

form followed the boy home to his bed-chamber; and not a 
sentence was written in academic exercises, not a declama- 
tion attempted in the college-chapel, but showed the omni- 
presence of his genius to youthful heads. This made every 
youth his defender, and boys filled their mouths with argu- 
ments to prove that the orator had a heart." 

Emerson had no personal intercourse with this 
Boston world, just as he had not come near to his 
professors at college. He was only one of the com- 
munity who sat under the lights of the pulpit, an 
ambitious schoolboy of eighteen, with humble and 
unobserved business of his own. He assisted William 
in his school at his mother's house. He had acquired 
some slight experience in teaching at his clerical 
uncle's school in vacations, where his pupils were raw 
boys of his own age ; and he cordially hated it. He 
was hardly better pleased with the task of instructing 
the fashionable young ladies, also of not uneven age 
with his own, who came to his brother to finish their 
education. He was timid about his French ; he de- 
tested mathematics; and he was vexed by youthful 
defects. He was easily embarrassed, blushed, and had 
" no power of face," such as he especially admired in 
Edward ; his cheeks, he long complained, were tell- 
tales against his interests and dignity. The young 
ladies found means of confusion, and he had never 
lived with girls; when they became impossible, he 
would send them to his mother's room to study. 
These were trifles. The young schoolmaster, in the 
serious part of his task, did by teaching as he had 
done by his college work : he tried to do his duty, 
but it was against the grain. "Better tug at the 
oar," he writes toward the close of the year, " dig the 



22 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

mine, or saw wood ; better sow hemp or hang with it 
than sow the seeds of instruction." But he was soon 
broken to the harness, and showed sufficient capacity 
to be left in charge of the school while William went 
for an absence of two years to Gottingen to study for 
the ministry. 

During this period, in 1823, the family removed to 
Canterbury Lane, a country suburb, and for some years 
afterward their habits were migratory, and one or 
more of the boys were .always away from home. 
Emerson, now the responsible head, indulged some 
hope of becoming acquainted with Nature and reaping 
the fruits of her solitude ; but he was disappointed — 
he was a town-boy with slow pulses and had not then 
the secret of the woods and fields ; perhaps one rea- 
son was that he always took a book with him. He 
was happy in the fact that he earned money honestly, 
and there was enough of it, but otherwise he was sub- 
ject to youthful depression; he had besides strained 
his constitution, of which what he calls his apathy 
was a sign. He was at all times a most discouraging 
critic of himself. He had been ambitious, notwith- 
standing his lack of precocity ; and in the chill that 
followed the enthusiasms of boyhood and before the 
approaching prospect of mediocrity he discomf ortably 
wrote that not any " application of which I am capa- 
ble, any efforts, any sacrifices, could at this moment 
restore any reasonableness to the familiar expectations 
of my earlier youth." He did not cease from effort, 
however, or waver in his own strict line. He was 
always persistent in self-will. He was still the des- 
ultory reader of literature and history that he had 
ever been ; and he had written from the beginning of 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 23 

his teaching, every night in his chamber, his first 
thoughts on morals and genius. Montaigne, in Cot- 
ton's translation, was his great discovery at Canterbury 
Lane. " I remember the delight and wonder in which 
I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself 
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it 
spoke to my thought and experience." The book 
was the first that addressed him as an equal soul ; 
and there were never many that were so fortunate. 

A moment of stress is discernible, just before he 
reached his majority, in the natural deepening of his 
self-examination and solemnizing of his moral pur- 
pose ; but it is more significantly marked by that con- 
scious retirement upon himself as his true base, which 
is expressed in the first line of verse that has his 
voice in it and has always been remembered in spite 
of the very proper disfavour with which he regarded 
the poem as a whole, — 

" Good-by, proud world ! I'm going home." 

His future rings in it. At the moment, however, it 
seemed a digression, for his habitual thoughts were 
centred on beginning to prepare for that profession 
to which his .birth and breeding and all the common 
reason and utility of life, as well as his own choice, 
assigned him. " In a month," he writes, " I shall be 
legally a man ; and I deliberately dedicate my time, 
my talents, and my hopes to the church." Other sen- 
tences in this boyish autobiographic record of the 
moment are significant. " I cannot dissemble that my 
abilities are below my ambition. ... I have, or had, 
a strong imagination, and consequently a keen relish 
for the beauties of poetry. My reasoning faculty is 



24 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

proportionally weak ; nor can I ever hope to write a 
Butler's Analogy or an Essay of Hume. Nor is it 
strange that with this confession I should choose 
theology; for the highest species of reasoning upon 
divine subjects is rather the fruit of a sort of moral 
imagination than of the reasoning machines, such as 
Locke and Clarke and David Hume. ... I inherit 
from my sire a formality of manners and speech, but 
I derive from him or his patriotic parent a passionate 
love for the strains of eloquence. I burn after the 
aliquid immensum infinitumque which Cicero desired. 
What we ardently love, we learn to imitate. But 
the most prodigious genius, a seraph's eloquence, will 
shamefully defeat its own end if it has not first won 
the heart of the defender to the cause he defends." 
All his points of view, in the prospect of the future, 
are here contained; they summarize and carry for- 
ward past tendencies, — ambition, self-examination, 
the contempt of reasoning, the thought of eloquence, 
the preoccupation with morals, intellectual integrity. 
Throughout early years and into manhood Emerson 
was in exclusively clerical surroundings. The tradi- 
tions of the house, his circle of relatives, all the conver- 
sation of his life, were in this atmosphere. There was 
no outlet from it except into books which he read by 
himself. He was without intellectual companionship ; 
he had in his forming years neither comrade nor 
leader. He kept up a commonplace correspondence 
with some of his classmates ; but his only true sympa- 
thizer was his Aunt Mary, to whom he confided his life, 
even sending her his private journal to read. His 
mental growth thus isolated contained no elements of 
disturbance. He did not conceive religion intellectu- 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 25 

ally, and hence was little vulnerable on that side ; 
religion in his habit of thought was rather a moral 
discipline than an argument of the mind ; the profes- 
sion was, in his notion of its practice, a mode of 
hortatory moral discourse, and his ideal of it was " to 
put on eloquence as a robe." Doubt, however, in the 
form in which it was to end the clerical hopes of this 
household, had already entered the family, and this 
may have been in his mind when he wrote down his 
conviction of the need to scrutinize the cause he was 
to defend. William was consulting Goethe at Weimar 
as to his duty in entering the ministry, and notwith- 
standing the conventional advice he received to ac- 
commodate himself to the world and not disappoint 
the hopes of his family, he was coming to an adverse 
decision. 

In Emerson himself, who did not have William's 
contact with a larger world of thought and life, there 
is no early sign of reluctance to follow the career to 
which his environment and traditions pledged him. 
There was no breaking up of the old system ; no 
storm and stress ; he was born free from all that ; it 
was neither in his situation nor his nature to be so 
stirred ; and. when he went on to the Divinity School 
at Cambridge, though not without thought about the 
matter, suggested apparently by Hume, he was resolved 
if not assured in his course. He closed the school Feb- 
ruary 8, 1825. Summing up the results of the four 
working years, he says : " I have written two or three 
hundred pages that will be of use to me. I have 
earned two or three thousand dollars, which have 
paid my debts and obligated my neighbors ; so that 
I thank Heaven I can say none of my house is the 



26 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

worse for me." He had won his first and fundamen- 
tal success in the homely task of earning his bread 
and paying his way. He had also continued to write 
verse and to read history and literature, in which 
together with his meditation on morals his real life 
had been ; school-keeping was a makeshift and an 
interruption. The family circumstances were more 
comfortable than they had ever been, and the pros- 
pect brighter. Edward, after a brilliant career at 
Harvard, had opened a school at Roxbury, and 
Charles, the youngest, whom Dr. Holmes describes as 
"the most angelic adolescent my eyes ever beheld," 
was taking his turn at college. His mother returned 
to Boston for a brief period. 

Emerson immediately went to Cambridge, where 
he took a room at 14 Divinity Hall, being permitted 
to join the studies of the middle class in consideration 
of his private reading the past year ; but the prospect 
soon clouded. The weakness of constitution that was 
disclosed in all the brothers in turn showed itself 
unmistakably in his general condition. Ill health 
began to afflict him. His eyes failed and after a 
month's residence he gave up and sought recuperation 
in working on his uncle Ladd's farm at Newton. By 
summer he was well enough to drag the chain of 
school-keeping again, taking a few pupils at Cam- 
bridge, and in the fall a public school at Chelmsford, 
where his brother Bulkeley was cared for ; and the 
new year, 1826, coming round, and Edward in his turn 
and for the second time falling ill from overwork at 
his law studies in addition to other employments, and 
being sent off to the Mediterranean, he took his school 
at Roxbury. This winter he suffered much from rheu- 



L] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 27 

matism, and especially a lame hip. In April his 
mother moved to Cambridge, and he joined her, tak- 
ing pupils for the last time that summer. At Chelms- 
ford William had visited him on returning from 
abroad and had told him his decision to relinquish the 
ministry, and pursue the law. " I was very sad," 
Emerson said, " for I knew how much it would grieve 
my mother; and it did." He was himself not then 
affected by the example. He had kept an inter- 
mittent connection with the Divinity School, at such 
times as he was in Cambridge, and on October 10, 
1826, was approbated to preach by the Middlesex 
Association of Ministers, without examination, for the 
reason that the state of his eyes had not permitted 
him to take notes of such lectures as he had attended. 
He afterward said had they examined him they would 
not have accepted him, a remark which indicates that 
he was aware later, if not then, that there had been 
much heterodoxy in his belief at an early time. He 
preached his first sermon, October 15, at Waltham. 

Emerson was now, at twenty-three, externally a young 
candidate, with weak eyes and rheumatism and a low 
physical tone. He had struggled against his disabili- 
ties, but his health was steadily worse. A stricture 
developed in his right chest, giving him much pain 
after the effort of preaching. It was thought advis- 
able to send him to the South for the winter ; and, his 
unfailing uncle, Samuel Ripley, furnishing the means, a 
few weeks after Edward's return from the Mediterra- 
nean he sailed, November 25, in the ship Clematis from 
Boston to Charleston, and soon went on to St. Augustine 
in Florida. There he spent the winter months, thor- 
oughly bored. " I stroll on the sea-beach and drive 



28 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

a green orange over the sand with a stick," he wrote 
home disconsolately. The single bright spot in this 
southern journey was his acquaintance with Achille 
Murat, who took him for a visit to his plantation at 
Tallahassee and accompanied him by sea from St. 
Augustine to Charleston a rough nine days' passage. 
He arrived there in April and slowly came north, hav- 
ing preached at St. Augustine, Charleston, Washington, 
Philadelphia, and New York, and reached home in 
June, going to the Old Manse, where his mother had 
spent the year with Dr. Ripley. He was better, but he 
had not been cured of the trouble in his chest. 

He took a room at the Divinity School in Cambridge 
and resided there through the year and afterward 
very happily, it would appear, and idly, according to 
his own impression. He applied the best medicine to 
his case, indulging his desultory instincts, seeking out 
pleasant companions, laughers, he says, by preference, 
and slipping off into the woods, with old clothes and 
old hat, picking berries and anticipating the sauntering 
country habits of later years, a " lounging, capricious, 
unfettered mode of life." Edward was in Daniel 
Webster's office in Boston, incessantly alive and striv- 
ing, of a more burning spirit, the pride and hope of 
many friends, and most of Emerson, who never mentions 
him without some adoring word of brotherly delight ; 
but there were already warnings to which the impetu- 
ous, ambitious, overflowing boy would not listen. 
Charles, too, then in his last year at Harvard, where 
like Edward he had been a first scholar, was near at 
hand and came to call occasionally — " the same honey- 
catcher of pleasure, favor, and honor that he hath been, 
and without paying for it, like Edward, with life and 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 29 

limb. He reads Plato and Aristophanes in Greek, and 
writes, as the President said of the brood, like hoary 
hairs. " Emerson wrote new sermons, but none too 
many, having his store of old writings ; and he often 
preached, sometimes at his father's church in Boston, 
but usually as a substitute in the neighbouring towns. 
He was still unwilling to settle, owing to his health. 

In June, 1828, the first great grief fell upon the 
family. Edward went suddenly insane : " there he 
lay, Edward, the admired, learned, eloquent, striving 
boy, a maniac." He recovered his reason, but his 
future was at an end. He required a southern climate, 
and took a clerkship at Porto Rico, where he continued 
to live an invalid life. Emerson, though he had long 
recognized the family weakness of constitution, felt 
no foreboding for himself from this incident. He had 
always looked on himself as an opposite to Edward ; 
his own sluggishness, embarrassment, passivity, were 
protective, he justly thought, — kindly integuments 
of nature round his spark of life ; and he favoured his 
rather low vitality by stopping in time, by waiting, by 
wastingthe days, never forcing his mind, never straining. 
He read if his eyes allowed, he walked if his hip per- 
mitted, he preached if his lungs held out; he went slow. 
He now, in December, 1828, became engaged to Ellen 
Louisa Tucker, a daughter of a Boston merchant, whom 
he had met while preaching at Concord, New Hamp- 
shire; she was a beautiful young lady of seventeen, a 
consumptive. It was perhaps under the incitement 
of life caused by this new change that, a good oppor- 
tunity arising, he decided to accept a settlement. He 
was ordained colleague of the Rev. Henry Ware, at the 
Old North Church in Boston, March 11, 1829 j and a few 



30 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

weeks later, on the departure of Dr. Ware to Europe pre- 
paratory to assuming a Divinity School chair at Har- 
vard, he came into sole charge of the parish. He was 
married September 30, of the same year ; he lived in 
Chardon Street, and gathered his mother and his brother 
Charles, who was studying law, into his household. 

It is plain that Emerson was scholastically ill pre- 
pared for his profession. His studies, pursued mainly 
in private, and broken in upon by ill health and school 
tasks, must have been of the most superficial kind, 
and intellectually flimsy. He was never grounded in 
theology or metaphysics. His principal intellectual 
acquisition was literary, lying in the region of poetry 
and the more ponderous English prose ; his own think- 
ing was mainly ethical ; and in his mind he responded 
most to the stimulus of the ideas of Coleridge and 
the images of Swedenborg. A religious decadence, 
such as occurs periodically in history, had taken place 
in New England; he became a writer of this deca- 
dence and its chief example ; that is his true position. 
The decadence was already fully accomplished in the 
bones of his spirit before he began to think ; the theo- 
logical blood had run out in him ; the historical ideas 
of Christianity had faded from his mind ; his inner 
biography, under the lethargy of his invalidism and the 
unexacting nature of his ministerial employment as a 
substitute, was the story of a gradual detachment 
from traditional religion so natural that it may be 
described as a painless death. He seems not aware 
himself how honeycombed was his belief ; if it re- 
tained an apparent outline of convention and conform- 
ity, it was nevertheless such a shell as would at one 
touch fall into dust. 



i.J THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 31 

His youthful journals and family letters from the 
time he began to prepare for the ministry show the 
drift of his mind, and the more clearly because they dis- 
close no friction, no disturbance, no unrest. The weak- 
ness of his intellectual interest was earliest and most 
continually in evidence. At twenty he had written of 
his blindness to " the truth of a theology" that " sounds 
like nonsense in the ear of the understanding," the fac- 
ulty which is " made in us arbiter of things seen, the 
prophet of things unseen " ; and four years later at St. 
Augustine he hoped for the hour when " disputed truths 
in theology" would cease to absorb the elucidative 
genius of ministers while these should at last concern 
themselves with " passages in the history of the soul." 
He spoke of God as " the unseen idea." He began to 
look on Christianity, viewed in time, as " a piece of 
human history." He got " bare life " for a belief in im- 
mortality without Christianity. There was in all these 
years a general elimination going on in his mind, just 
as in the quoted instances he reduces the importance 
of historical elements, depreciates theology, and puts 
the concept of God farther off, and all without a trace of 
feeling, very tranquilly, at most with a touch of irony 
in his question. There was also a concentration deepen- 
ing down within him, especially in the moral part ; his 
mind was rounding in to one centre, to the immediacy 
of religion, to the individual man and the present 
moment, to intuitional life. " Every man is a new 
creation ; " "a portion of truth lives in every moment 
to every man ; " "a revelation proceeding each moment 
from the divinity to the mind of the observer: " such are 
typical sentences and carry with them by implication 
some derogation of the distant, the past, the things of 



32 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

another. " I am curious to know what the Scriptures 
do in very deed say about that exalted person who died 
on Calvary ; but I do think it, at this distance of time 
and in the confusion of language, to be a work of 
weighing of phrases and hunting in dictionaries." 
The stream of tendency in all this is plain ; it is away 
from doctrinal theology, from a personal God, from an 
authoritative church, from a historic Christ, from an ex- 
clusive Scripture ; it is toward the evangel of the self- 
lighted soul. The centre so found was, for Emerson, 
primarily a moral one, his thought lying principally 
in that region at all times ; but from the beginning he 
shows traces of a different perception, of the notion 
of illumination, of the presence of the divine in the 
individual's life at exalted moments. 

Such a development, though still in its inchoate 
stages, harmonized with Emerson's temperament. 
He was by nature an extreme individualist. In our 
political phrase he carried his sovereignty under his 
own hat. He took no counsel of any man, or of any 
mind. Montaigne, his only literary enthusiasm, ap- 
pealed to him as his own voice speaking out of another 
century. He had been bred to practical indepen- 
dence ; and paying one's way and thinking one's way 
are good neighbours. He had been always intellectu- 
ally alone ; his mind had never ranged very far, had 
never been developed by extension, but had worked 
intensively with a certain narrowness of view and few- 
ness of ideas. It is fair to acknowledge also that his 
physical limitations predisposed him to the course he 
took. He could never be a scholar. If the sanction 
of Christianity was a matter of theological learning, 
historical criticism, and the abilities of a doctor of the 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 33 

church, it was not for him at first hand, and he could 
take nothing at second hand. It is not that he would 
have come to any different conclusion, had he been 
learned ; but in the actual working out of the case his 
scant preparation, his weak eyesight, and ill health 
made it easy for him to slight the importance of that 
which belonged to the past and reposed on history and 
learning. He was, indeed, a liberal by birth, and had 
no need to kill the twice-slain already ; but his mind 
had worked only in the religious field, and with much 
restriction even there. It was against the narrowness 
of religion, as he knew it, that he revolted ; the old 
formulas, emptied of essential meaning as he received 
them, could not hold the expansion of his own spirit- 
ual life, and he had, in fact, already substituted others 
for them derived from Coleridge. It is surprising 
that he did not better appreciate the state of his faith 
with regard to that of his flock. The rifts under his feet 
were cracking wide between them and him, but he 
seems not to have known it ; and when he gave his 
first sermon, characteristically telling his parishioners 
that Christianity was less the expounding of texts 
than the revelation of a present Deity, there is no 
reason to believe that he did not contemplate long 
service in the pulpit. 

If Emerson felt any misgivings in his position, 
they arose from the sense of prosperity after clouded 
days. Edward was relieved from the worst of afflic- 
tions ; William was established in the law at New 
York ; he was himself a Boston minister, as his father 
had been before him, and able to give a home to those 
dearest to him ; he was blessed in a happy marriage 
for his private lot. He doubted the continuance of such 



34 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

happiness. He followed in his father's footsteps as a 
public character of the city, was on the school-board, 
chaplain of the State Senate, and gave the "charity 
sermon " at the Old South. He assisted Father 
Taylor in founding the Sailors' Mission, and earned the 
lifelong respect of that strong and vehement evange- 
list. He opened his church to the antislavery orators 
who twice preached emancipation there. In parochial 
work he was not fitted to excel. His character as a 
visitor is best remembered by the anecdote of the old 
veteran on his death-bed, who, in view of Emerson's 
hesitations, flared out, — " Young man, if you don't 
know your business, you had better go home ; " and by 
the sexton's remark, — " He does not make his best 
impression at a funeral." In his own church he held 
weekly expositions of the Scriptures, giving careful 
attention to such exegesis. In the pulpit he preached 
on Sundays and there won his first admirers. His 
manner was solemn and simple, with much earnestness ; 
his clear elocution made the charm of his delivery ; 
his ministerial behaviour in all the offices of the desk 
was refined, select, high-bred. He was a master of 
pulpit decorum. His youth was still an element in the 
personal attraction of his presence and his message, 
and it was especially the young who heard him gladly. 
Two only of his sermons have been printed ; the re- 
mainder, one hundred and seventy-one, are in manu- 
script, and the bulk of them must belong to this period. 
They are described by his literary executor, Mr. Cabot, 
as both ethical and doctrinal and differing less from con- 
ventional modes of the day than would be expected, the 
moral ideas being " presented in Scriptural language, 
as if they belonged to the body of accepted doctrine," 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 35 

and sometimes possibly supported " by arguments that 
had more weight with his hearers than with him- 
self." The diction is occasionally marked by an un- 
clerical phrase, but this is not more noticeable than the 
homely word characteristic of his literary style. " In 
general," says Mr. Cabot, " all is within the conven- 
tions of the Unitarian pulpit." He was well received 
by his people ; he got near to younger hearts, at least, 
who found some novelty in him, a spiritual quality ; 
but his thought was still put forth in the dress of 
Christian truth. 

The crisis which brought an end to this superficially 
admirable condition after three years, and before 
Emerson was thirty, proceeded wholly from himself ; 
it was of his own making ; he was the only person 
truly interested. His constitutional incapacity to 
adapt himself to others in personal relations — the 
embarrassment, coldness, and reluctances of which he 
always complained — belonged also to his mental re- 
lations ; he could not adapt himself to the thoughts 
of others. He began to question his own integrity in 
conforming to the will of the church in external prac- 
tices. The most intractable thought is that which 
takes to itself form in a rite, and so becomes organic 
in the custom and habit of a people, a part of the 
order of things. The observances of the church are 
such an inveterate form of truth. It was the office of 
Emerson as a minister to perform one high ecclesias- 
tical act in which such truth was so embedded through 
all the Christian centuries, — the rite of the communion. 
It was the last tie that held him to historical Christian- 
ity, but it was the holiest bond of Christendom. He 
desired to sever it. In June, 1832, he proposed that 



36 EALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

the use of the elements be discontinued and the occa- 
sion should be held as a mere commemoration of 
the founder. The church declined to accede. It was 
characteristic of his youth of mind, in which there was 
at all times much naiveness, that he thought this a 
proper and natural proposal and that he believed that 
it might be accepted ; he found nothing revolutionary 
in it, but only a simple and sincere admission that 
religion was of the spirit and in a pure state excluded 
forms ; such a religion he conceived Christ had meant 
to initiate. The example of William, who wrote a 
letter to Dr. Ripley two years before this time, setting 
forth the objections to the communion service, may have 
weighed with him ; he had come up to the particular 
question more slowly as was his wont, but he had 
answered it in the same way. His own words closing 
the argument, in a sermon preached September 9, 
1832, deserve to be quoted : " Having said this, I have 
said all. I have no hostility to this institution ; I am 
only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither 
should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other 
people had I not been called by my office to admin- 
ister it. That is the end of my opposition, that I am 
not interested in it. I am content that it stand to the 
end of the world if it please men and please Heaven, 
and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces." Quiet 
as the words are, they contain an aggressive personality 
as the velvet contains steel ; and it is the first time 
that he showed it. He had hardened and stiffened 
under the pressure of a duty, and he now exhibited 
his quality, that radical and fearless will to assert 
himself, which determined his life. Emerson had 
seriously considered what he should do, and had 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 37 

come to the only conclusion possible for him. It was 
a necessity of his character. He could not accommo- 
date himself to others. After preaching his sermon, 
he resigned on the same day. Outward honesty was 
a necessary supplement to his inner integrity. There 
was no shock to his own mind; the motions of his 
mind were always as smooth as light, as silent as growth. 
He had believed in morals and ideas rather than in 
Christ all the time, and in Unitarianism from the start 
Christ occupied a diminished place. The only jar for 
Emerson was to his affections, for he was sorry to give 
pain to his kindred ; a family hope and pride were sacri- 
ficed. " Whosoever loves father or mother more than me 
is not worthy of me " was a text often in his thoughts. 
Truth in the spirit of the Master had taken the vacant 
place that even the Master had never held in him. He 
had come to his maturity, to be a law unto himself, to 
be no other's man ; he withdrew into himself as saints 
of old into their solitary caves. He was, as has been 
said, an extreme individualist, young and self-willed ; 
and he had come now into his own. 

It must be recognized that the particular occasion 
of his leaving the church was incidental ; he was 
already disjoined from all social and institutional re- 
ligion in spirit, and knew the fact. He had gone out 
on a question of form ; but the fact was that his faith 
had ceased to be Christian, and no longer moved 
through the channels of organized religion except 
with friction and embarrassment. Public prayer in 
an official form was unwelcome to him, and he had 
long felt that it contained an essential element of 
insincerity, of inadequacy, of suppression of individu- 
ality. He was incapable of taking a social view, of 



38 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

subduing himself to the mass even as their leader. 
He had nothing in him of the orator who finds him- 
self in the hearts of his audiences, or of the politician 
who embodies the thought and aspiration of a party; 
he could not take on the character of a representative 
person and be the organ of a community of worship. 
As early as January, 1832, he wrote in his Journal, 
" It is the best part of the man, I sometimes think, 
that revolts most against his being a minister " ; and 
again he wrote, " The profession is antiquated." He 
seems to have behaved with regard to it as he had 
done with respect to his college studies and to school- 
keeping ; he tried to do his external duty, but it was 
against the grain. In the end his own character pre- 
vailed. Yet he did not recognize the. gravity of his 
act. He seems to have looked on Christianity and all 
its adjuncts as an accident that the church could lay 
aside, and yet the church remain, — a universal reli- 
gion in which he could still minister in his place. In 
severing his relation with his charge, and abandoning 
ritual, he did not look on himself as separating from 
the church itself; he was slow to understand that 
his place was no longer in the pulpit, and he discov- 
ered the fact only much later and with reluctance. 

The incident of his resignation had come in the 
train of private misfortune and grief. His wife had 
died February 8, 1831 ; through these months it was 
his habit to walk out to Eoxbury in the early morn- 
ing to visit her grave. The strain of these events had 
affected his health, and it was thought best that he 
should seek relief in a foreign voyage. He wrote a 
letter of farewell to the church, December 22, and 
sailed from Boston, Christmas Day. He landed at 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 39 

Malta, passed on into Sicily by Syracuse and Messina 
northward to Naples, Rome, and Venice, and arrived 
in Paris by June. His health was greatly improved ; 
he had not been so well since college days. He was, 
however, lonely and Weary; he was not a good trav- 
eller; and he was neither adapted by cultivation to 
appreciate the things of an old civilization, nor had 
he any entrance either to popular or social life. He 
had the eye of a foreigner, and was swathed in pro- 
vincialism. He was so impervious that the voyage 
had no effect in enlarging his mind, and he after- 
ward shows in his writings a certain contempt for 
the benefits of travel. What he wrote of Venice 
is a sufficient illustration ; seen from the sea, in June, 
it " looked for some time like nothing but New York. 
It is a great oddity, a city for beavers, but to my 
thought a most disagreeable residence. You feel 
always in prison and solitary. It is as if you were 
always at sea. I soon had enough of it." He sums 
up his journey : "A man who was no courtier, but 
loved men, went to Rome, and there lived with boys. 
He came to France, and in Paris lives alone and sel- 
dom speaks. If he do not see Carlyle in Edinburgh, 
he may go back to America without saying anything 
in earnest, except to Cranch and Landor." The hope 
of meeting some of the writers whom he most ad- 
mired, and especially Carlyle, had been the determin- 
ing cause of his going to Europe rather than to the 
West Indies to see Edward. The day spent with 
Carlyle at Craigenputtock was memorable as a recog- 
nition by each other of two highly contrasted spirits 
and the beginning of lifelong friendship between them. 
H!e also saw Landor, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. But 



40 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

in meeting these men lie lost his last illusion; there 
was to be no companionship for him even with great 
men; he was disappointed in their quality, and never 
afterward expected to find sufficiency in others. To 
avoid great men became a maxim with him ; they 
were sure to disappoint one's hopes. The particular 
defect in these four was their lack of insight into 
religious truth. " They have no idea," he writes, " of 
that species of moral truth which I call the first 
philosophy." That is, to speak bluntly, they did not 
measure to his yard. It was almost a professional 
narrowness ; he had the mind of the minister, though 
he had the ideas of the transcendentalist. Upon the 
voyage home he reviewed the situation ; there was 
much seething within him ; his own thoughts came in 
flocks, like birds preparing for a flight ; but the mo- 
ment had not yet arrived. He ends, " I know not, I 
have no call to expound ; but this is my charge, plain 
and clear, to act faithfully upon my own faith; to 
live by it myself, and see what a hearty obedience 
will do." He arrived in Boston, October 9, 1833. 

He joined his mother and lived with her at Newton. 
The difficulty of self-support was obviated by an in- 
heritance from his wife's share of her father's estate, 
which assured him an income of twelve hundred dol- 
lars a year. He had a dream of settling in the Berk- 
shires, calling Edward home to live with him, and 
starting a magazine of which the brothers should be 
chief contributors ; but nothing came of this scheme. 
He occupied himself with preaching and lecturing. 
He gave a sermon at his own church immediately on 
his return, of which the burden was that a reform was 
at hand, a change from the ancient federal idea of 



i.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 41 

religion as a thing of the race to an individualistic 
conception of it as .a thing of the private soul. Such 
a millennial expectation of the approach of a new state 
of things, or the appearance of a great man to renew 
and purify the days, was a frequent mental condition 
with him in the after course of his life and thought. 
He usually preached every Sunday for four years. 
He added lecturing to his labours, generally in con- 
nection with some association, like the Natural 
History Society, the Mechanic Apprentices' Library, 
the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or 
the American Institute of Instruction — Boston organ- 
izations. He began with popular science and travel, 
but soon passed on to biography and literature. In 
this way he lectured in the season of 1833-1834 on 
TJie Relation of Man to the Globe and on Water, for ex- 
ample ; in 1834-1835 on Italy and also on Michael 
Angelo, Luther, Milton, George Fox, and Burke, with 
an introduction on the Tests of Great Men; and in 
1835-1836 on English Literature, a complete popular 
survey from the Anglo-Saxons to Scott, in ten lectures. 
He gave the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in the 
summer of 1834, his first personal appearance as a 
poet, but the Hymn written for the ordination of his 
successor in the North Church shortly before was the 
earliest poetical publication. He also gave, Septem- 
ber 12, 1835, the Address on the occasion of the sec- 
ond centennial anniversary of the incorporation of the 
town of Concord, and on the 19th of April, 1836, 
he contributed the Concord Hymn to the patriotic 
celebration of the day at the dedication of the battle 
monument. During these years he especially preached 
at New Bedford, where he failed to be settled because 



42 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

he stipulated that he should neither celebrate the 
communion nor offer prayer unless moved to pray at 
the moment, and at East Lexington, near Concord, 
where he served regularly for three years. 

He had now settled at Concord. In October, 1834, 
he and his mother had joined Dr. Ripley at the Old 
Manse. It was at the moment of Edward's death in 
Porto Rico, where his life ended on the first of that 
month. After a year's residence, in the fall of 1835, 
he took the house which was ever after his home, hav- 
ing bought it for thirty-five hundred dollars. He had 
married, September 14, Lydia Jackson, a lady of Ply- 
mouth. Charles and his mother both joined him in 
his new home, and all were happy in the expectation 
that his brother also would soon be married and the 
two families would live together. In the spring of 
1836, however, Charles, who had fulfilled the promise 
of his college career and was well advanced in his 
legal studies, fell suddenly ill with quick consump- 
tion, and died in May, in New York, while on his 
journey south. This second bereavement of a beloved 
brother was met by Emerson with his customary 
placid fortitude, but he felt it as a deflowering of his 
life. Solemnized by such sorrow, his youth became to 
him a sacred memory ; he again and again returned to 
it in his verse, and this music of his boyhood with his 
brothers is the deepest personal chord of his poetry. 
How strangely things fall out ! The group of rosy 
boys — none too ruddy, it is to be feared — had gone 
to their fates ; poverty and ambition are hard task- 
masters, hardest to the best ; two, the most brilliant 
and admired, were dead; the eldest had found a use- 
ful and undistinguished career in the law ; and the 



I.] THE VOICE OBEYED AT PRIME 43 

last, hardly surviving by those dull integuments of 
apathy and coldness and slowness, had lived only to 
leave the profession which had been the goal of their 
youthful hopes. The old mother had her chamber of 
peace in his home where she w T as to pass many tranquil 
years. For him life went on in his Concord seclusion, 
but it was robbed of its morning. In the fall his first 
child, a son, was born. Though he had, in a sense, 
stood aside from life, and seemed in many ways to 
hold but a left-handed relation to the world, he was 
much occupied. If the world did not- want him, — and 
this is a note often heard in his self-confidences and 
letters at this time, — yet that was not his affair. He 
would do his part, as he had opportunity, in his un- 
regarded corner. He could help to introduce Carlyle 
to his countrymen, for example, and in the summer 
of this year did so with a preface to the first Ameri- 
can edition of Sartor Resartus. He had taken one 
unalterable resolution on settling in Concord, "Hence- 
forth I design not to utter any speech, poem, or book 
that is not entirely and peculiarly my work." He had 
achieved self-reliance, and in this leave-taking of all 
others he had found the pathway of his leadership. 



CHAPTER II 

" NATURE " AND ITS COROLLARIES 

Emerson had at all times an enormous power of re- 
sistance to his environment. Through these early years 
in the home of his boyhood, in his obscure and sickly 
youth, in the Old North Church, however he might be 
externally occupied with things of use and wont, be- 
neath the daily crust of college work, school work, and 
church work, he lived another life ; there the new life 
was forming as under an old shell. He expressed this 
life in verse ; nothing is more significant than the per- 
sistence with which he continued to write it, though 
undistinguished and mediocre and without any mark 
of genius ; it was the sign of his solitude, of his self- 
trust and self-absorption. He was intimately aware 
of the poetic part of his nature, and early idealized it 
and set it apart as a higher self. "A certain poet 
told me," he was afterward accustomed to write, and 
later he named him Osman ; it was this poet known 
within ; and The Discontented Poet : a Masque, a work 
never completed, was self-portraiture begun in these 
years. He was not deceived, for he was primarily 
a poet, though with imperfect faculty, and had the 
habits of a poet, both personal and mental. Thus 
from the budding of his mind he meditated and brooded 
and waited; and whatever came to him to be received, 
he demanded of it that it should have a preestablished 

44 



chap, ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 45 

harmony with his life and a power of intimacy with 
his soul, self-evidence that should lie in its being a 
revelation of himself ; indifferent to argument, impa- 
tient of opinion, he would have only that conviction of 
truth which consists of the life itself. He was also, 
in the intellectual part of his nature, a moralist; it 
was the moral nature of things that was dearest to 
him, not passion or action as such, not science nor 
letters, not divinity, but morals. He had collected 
truisms, since he could think at all, — old saws as he 
afterward designated them ; but these had more than 
their proverbial and commonplace character of scat- 
tered wisdom in his eyes ; they brought law with them 
from the first, they showed the moral nature of man, 
they declared God. He was, too, in the third place, 
deeply pledged to that mood which makes the uni- 
verse the theatre of the soul, and for each man prima- 
rily of his own soul, as that in which from the forma- 
tion of the world all that is is interested ; no thinker 
has more exalted the private soul, and no man has 
borne his "eternal part" with greater pride. He 
required an arrangement of truth that should corre- 
spond to this threefold nature of the poet, the mor- 
alist, and the mystic devotee, and in his germinating 
time he found it in the group of related ideas known 
as transcendentalism for which Channing had prepared 
him and in which Coleridge instructed him ; he had 
truly no other teachers. Transcendentalism contained 
the preestablished harmony with himself that he de- 
manded ; it was adapted equally to his strength and to 
his weakness ; impulse, character, preference, his de- 
ficiency and his redundancy, it chimed with all his 
temperament and the natural motions of his mind, 



46 EALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

and gave him to himself upon every side. It disbur- 
dened him of the incubus of the past; it made him 
sovereign in his own right ; it delivered into his hands 
the entire universe to be his own. Morality was fun- 
damental in it ; poetry radiated from it ; it crowned 
self, and invested the private soul with a universal 
sceptre. In proportion as he absorbed the ideas of 
transcendentalism, Emerson came to intellectual ma- 
turity; he was made a man-thinker; his original force 
was released. These discoveries, this illumination 
slowly going on, all this formation of a new soul in 
nature was accomplished at his thirtieth year. The 
time was ripe. Old things began to fall away in that 
protective external environment in which he had 
grown, and especially the temporal and circumstantial 
marks of Christianity fell off. He left the "antiquated 
profession " ; he ceased to put his thoughts forth in a 
Christian dress ; he put them forth in the dress of 
transcendental ideas. There was really less change 
than appeared. They were the same thoughts ; he 
was the same man ; he had never changed his faith, 
for he had only one. But he had cast the old skin. 

The little book called Nature was the publication of 
this fact. It announced Emerson's genius. It might 
seem a slender offering for a young man of thirty- 
three, a few chapters of poetical thoughts upon well- 
worn themes. In the substance there is nothing novel, 
but there is in the book a certain exhilaration, a vitali- 
zation. It was published in the fall of 1836 ; like all 
his work it had been much rewritten. Three years 
earlier, on his voyage home, he had mentioned in his 
Journal being pleased with "my book about Nature," 
and it was doubtless this which he recast and added to 



ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 47 

in the summer of 1836 to make the published volume. 
Its inception would seem to belong to the period of 
his resignation. That event threw him back upon his 
own mind ; and in the solitude of travel and under the 
stimulus of a new mode of public appeal he wrote 
his first secular essay. It bears the mark of its origin. 
It has the bloom of the mind upon it. It is one of 
those rare books which seem the fruit and treasury 
of happy moments ; joy in the truth irradiates it, and 
at times the excited and delighted mind puts forth 
moods like dreams and passages that are a rhapsody 
of intellect. The intoxication, however, is sparingly 
indulged; there is nothing in excess; the ideas and 
scenes are few; the argument is brief. Emerson's 
grasp upon transcendentalism was neither profound 
nor various ; he was not a metaphysician. He was a 
literary man who read miscellaneously, and picked 
and chose what he liked, taking his own where he 
found it, and his own was what appealed to him, 
what stimulated him, what he could make his own. 
It was no part of his purpose to set forth transcen- 
dentalism itself, but to show its working in him. The 
book, in fact, does not so much directly address the 
mind as use the indirections of Nature herself upon 
the soul ; the sunrise, the haze of autumn, the winter 
starlight, seem the interlocutors, the prevailing sense 
is that of an exposition in poetry, a high discourse ; 
the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from 
the landscape as from his own breast ; it is Nature com- 
muning with the seer. Emerson never again rendered 
the state of his own soul in the visible world with 
such reality ; here he showed himself played upon by 
the ministries that shaped him with invisible hands. 



48 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON [chap. 

There is this personal charm in the book. The few 
stems of transcendental thought, dry and stiff in state- 
ment, are readily discerned, most clearly in those more 
extraneous parts of the discourse which were added for 
the sake of rounding out his treatment of the subject, 
but they ramify in every part alike. 

These ideas may be briefly described, for there is no 
occasion to elaborate them in this place. There are 
but three, but they are all-embracing. First, with 
regard to the soul : the soiil is divine and identical in 
all men, a spark of eternity, yet with light to disclose 
the infinite of nature without and by an inner ray to 
reveal its own eternal ground of being ; thus it pos- 
sesses the meaus of all knowledge, whether of self, of 
Nature, or of God. Secondly, with regard to Nature : 
Nature is the gigantic shadow of God cast in the senses, 
or, metaphysically, the realization of God in the un- 
conscious ; its sole function is to unlock the capacities 
of the soul, whether as energy or as knowledge; to 
supplement it as the material supplements the tool, to 
distribute its consciousness as the prism distributes 
the ray, to fulfil its being as his destiny fulfils the man ; 
it is the agency by which the soul becomes apparent in 
power and knowledge, and it is adequate to unfold the 
entire latency of the soul. Thirdly, with regard to 
God : deity has unobstructed access to all of every 
soul, and conversely every soul has like access to all 
of deity, the process in either case being a divine in- 
flowing, yet not continuously felt but rather in moments 
of exaltation such as are and can be only self-certified, 
the mystic moments of seemingly impersonal or 
expanded being. These three ideas — the primacy of 
the soul, the sufficiency of Nature, and the immediacy 



ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 49 

of God — are the triple root from which grows Emer- 
son's entire thought of the universe, in a philosophical 
sense. In this slim volume the first and last of these 
ideas are subordinated ; it is the second that is in full 
play, the idea of Nature. Nature is presented in four 
aspects of her service : that of commodity, or natural 
utility ; that of beauty, for delight in the visible scene 
as such or as the setting of man's action, or, again, as 
the material of art ; that of language, experience being 
the ground of all expression and hence facts the means 
of speech, both directly and symbolically, and the last 
is a higher degree of value, since the series of things 
in Nature corresponds to the series of thought in the 
mind, and therefore things of themselves are a better 
expression of thought than any words can be ; lastly, 
that of discipline, both of the understanding in learning 
and of the will in conforming, and most importantly 
of the latter, since Nature is completely moral, made 
of the moral, permeated with it, filled by it without 
a flaw, and imposes the moral upon man to which he 
must yield as to the necessary laws of his welfare. 
This account of the offices of Nature is followed by a 
lightly framed presentation of the doctrine of philosophi- 
cal idealism and of the immanence of spirit, and a conclu- 
sion is made by akind of epilogue in which the purification 
of the soul is represented as bringing about the reno- 
vation of nature, and the individual is counselled to 
begin so to build a new world. Such, slightly indicated, 
is the character of the contents of this book, which, 
however, is less remembered for its substratum of 
philosophy than for the lovely scenes of rural descrip- 
tion sown through it, the flashing facets of the ideas 
it handles in the detail of the meditation, and the uni- 



60 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

versal mould of poetry into which it casts the general 
notion of all being. It is, properly speaking, a medi- 
tation upon Nature, originating from poetical incite- 
ment, and it affects the reader at first, rightly or 
wrongly, as a dream of the mind in which the com- 
binations of image and thought take place with a sense 
of strangeness, and although without a jar, yet without 
reality. It admirably fulfils the conditions laid down 
toward its conclusion, " A wise writer will feel that 
the ends of study and composition are best answered by 
announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so 
communicating, through hope, new activity to the 
torpid spirit." 

The spirit of this dictum was a powerful control- 
ling principle in Emerson's method of life. He had 
observed the obvious fact that the minds of men are 
stirred by ideas which they imperfectly comprehend ; 
and being by predisposition a moralist, he was inter- 
ested rather in the energy of ideas than in ideas them- 
selves. He was not a pure thinker ; his mind did not 
rest in the intellectual plane and there endeavour to con- 
nect logically and systematically truth in the abstract ; 
he viewed truths in their moral action. Ideas were to 
him like a drug, of which the essence lies in the states 
of mind it induces, or like a political principle of which 
one examines not the abstract soundness, but how it 
works in practice. Empiricism and expediency, in spir- 
itual matters, are large elements in his reflection upon 
life. It belonged to his intuitional mind to be careless 
of the correlations of thought, since the process by which 
he arrived at conviction was sure, not liable to error; 
all truths would harmonize in the end, being self -exist- 
ent in the order of things ; for the logical faculty, for 



ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 51 

argument, for probable opinion and deferred judg- 
ment, for reasoning and its limitations, he had little re- 
gard — these things did not interest him. Hardly less 
fundamental in his character than his power of resist- 
ance to his environment was his power to ignore what 
did not interest him. He seized on certain ideas 
which brought with them conviction to his mind, and 
concerned himself with their operation rather than 
their justification by any other mode; he was, thus, an 
applier of ideas to life — that was his function. In 
this small book of Nature there was an entire arsenal 
of ideas, in the energetic sense ; it was a reservoir of 
power to which he constantly returned ; in fact, he 
added but little to the store, intellectually speaking, 
in after life ; there is, perhaps, no important idea 
in his later writings which is not here contained full 
grown or in embryo. But the application of this 
material was a lifelong story, a never ending sermon 
from this text. Placid and poetical and far away as 
the little transcendental tract appeared in its blue 
covers, it contained a sheaf of swords ; it seems a wild 
bower of quiet foliage starred with bloom and with 
outlooks into the blue distance, a talk in the antique 
portico, a philosophical dialogue in some old Italian 
garden ; but it was a twig of the Revolution, its ideas 
had riving force, they were explosive, anarchic. 

Emerson made the first important application of his 
ideas to life on the occasion of his Phi Beta Kappa 
Address at Harvard, August 31, 1837, — " an event," 
says Lowell, " without any former parallel in our liter- 
ary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the mem- 
ory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What 
crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering 



52 KALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what 
grim silence of foregone dissent ! " Alcott described 
the Address as "the first adequate statement of the 
new views that really attracted general attention." 
Its subject was The American Scholar. It presented 
the scholar as the thinker of the community, formed 
and fashioned by Nature, which is the direct source 
of truth, indebted to books but only as their master, 
and developed by action in which alone truth is 
vital; the duty of the scholar is self-trust, and his 
office is, in an age marked by democracy and individu- 
ality, to affirm himself in the faith that if he obeys 
his own instincts the whole world will come round to 
him. There was nothing startling in this, to read it 
now, save in the vigorous expression; one sees it is 
his own apology and declaration of principles, for the 
man was the main part of the speech ; but the living 
words touched the time. The gleam of them was a 
rally to one party, and the other party felt their edge ; 
for he stood there as a champion. 

For some years a movement had been gathering 
and growing in the community. It began, perhaps, 
by 1820 ; it was assisted by the writings of Carlyle ; 
but essentially it was an indigenous change consequent 
on the decadence of Puritanism in the more intelligent 
and better instructed circles, and especially in the im- 
mediate neighbourhood of Boston ; and it fed on what- 
ever came to hand from the flotsam of time, and 
especially from the East. It was a wave of new life, 
of innovation in thought. The freedom of a democ- 
racy, ungyved by the presence of an old civilization, 
favoured it. In a score of years it found expression, and 
all its vagaries were blanketed with one name, New 



ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 53 

England Transcendentalism. Simultaneously, cognate 
agitations, currents, and eddies in the great stream 
of general reform were going on. The variety of its 
manifest modes was infinite, and many of them af- 
fected men with laughter. Lowell and Hawthorne, 
who were young men at the time, have amply indulged 
their humour in describing what they saw ; and Emer- 
son's own account hardly veils his amusement. The 
general unrest came to a head in the Chardon Street 
Convention, 1840-1841, of which he names the compo- 
nent parts : " Madmen, mad women, men with beards, 
Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-Outers, Groaners, Agra- 
rians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, 
Calvinists, Unitarians, and philosophers," — a convoca- 
tion of dissent. The catalogue of the pure transcen- 
dental sectaries would be quite as disorderly and 
picturesque. It was a decade of carnival for reform. 
Eccentricity of opinion and behaviour reached the 
extreme. The great causes, Abolition, Labour, Temper- 
ance, survived ; the rest fell back among the anomalies 
of life always present in society that awake no atten- 
tion by their harmless singularity. In general, how- 
ever, the features of a period of extreme individualism 
stand out; and in that province where transcendental- 
ism peculiarly ruled the hour, it was a time of libera- 
tion, of experiment and speculation, and of active 
effort to incorporate a better social state. It was in 
education, religion, and economic reorganization that 
the new energy most worked, but the " Apostles of the 
Newness," as they were called, were gifted with many 
tongues ; the mood of all was that of individualism in 
rampant protest; and it was this mood — the mood of 
the hour — which found its bold, peaceful, and inspir- 



54 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap, 

ing spokesman in Emerson. But he stood apart and 
joined with none of the reformers ; for association with 
others was as impossible for him under the new rule as 
it had been under the old dispensation. All, however, 
were aware of his presence; and he fed from that 
time, whenever he spoke, the spirit of revolt and 
renewal. 

The edge of his attack lay in the bold advocacy of 
the rights of the individual, of whom under the guise 
of the scholar he presented the ideal type. Scholar, 
in the new vocabulary, took the old place of saint; 
he was man perfected in the attribute of self-trust, the 
fundamental virtue. Authority was eliminated from 
life ; for the soul alone is master, and being in direct 
union with God upon one side and Nature upon the 
other, needs neither mediator nor teacher, and in fact 
cannot allow their intervention, but must directly cer- 
tify all truth ; or, in other words, truth cannot come 
by mediation. The axe is laid to the root of the past 
with one blow; the past is superfluous and abolished 
is a means of arriving at truth; all truth is here 
and now, divinely present and divinely communicated. 
Past books may, indeed, be read, when the direct 
communication slackens, but it is only to restore the 
interrupted flow ; for there is an equality in souls, ' 
whence no man, however great, shall impose truth 
upon another; but what Goethe knew as truth the 
reader shall know as truth in the same way as Goethe, 
that is, not by Goethe's superscription, but by an in- 
ward warrant to his own soul, and thus is Goethe's 
equal, and what does not bear this private warrant 
he shall reject though the writer were ten times 
Goethe; all great writers were but young men in 



ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 55 

libraries when they wrote those books, and the read- 
ers are young men in libraries now. Institutions of 
all sorts, which are the past incarnated, must answer 
to the same challenge. It is the day of private judg- 
ment, of direct intuition, of the sufficient soul — of 
the individual ; authority, tradition, institutions, are 
under his feet ; he alone is sovereign, and only in the 
exercise of his own powers in a sovereign way is he a 
man. It is this serene and complete control of the 
past, this self-confidence in the present, this unfettered 
freedom to remake the world in our own image, that >' 
Emerson upholds as the ideal of the scholar's duty 
and the hope of the America that shall be. 

The second notable occasion on which Emerson put 
forth a practical application of his thought was the 
delivery of the Divinity School Address, also at Har- 
vard, July 15, 1838. In this he engaged himself more 
closely with the times and dealt in particular with the 
state of religion in the community. He dwelt on 
the decay of religion in the churches and sought for 
the source and remedy of this condition. He attacked 
historical Christianity, of which the church of tradition 
is the institution, and he concentrated his criticism 
upon the sacred authority that belongs to the person 
of Christ as the divine that became human and thence- 
forth the lawgiver of the soul in the Christian world. 
The course of the argument is plain from what has al- 
ready been brought forward in presenting his thought. 
The authority of the church had already been abolished 
by the doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the soul by 
virtue of its intuitive faculty which is the sole means 
of truth. With regard to Christ, Emerson reversed 
the old conception; instead of a divine person becom- 



56 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

ing human, he is a human person becoming divine, 
and the chief illustration of that process of perfection 
by which every soul unites with the divine; but he 
differs from others only in the degree of his progress, 
nor does his superiority vest him with authority over 
others, any more than in the case of Goethe, but each 
soul must follow the path of and from himself and 
draw strength, not from Christ, but from that common 
source which, as it once fed the soul of Christ, now 
feeds every soul born into the world of Nature. The 
doctrine of the equality of souls is applied to Christ 
as to all other masters of the past. Emerson also in- 
dicated, though less clearly, a fresh position or corol- 
lary. " The soul," he said, " knows no persons." This 
denied the personality of God ; nor did he at any time 
figure deity as a form of personal being. The general 
plea, urged with great spirituality of feeling, was that 
men should abandon the past, that is, in this case, the 
church and Christ as its head, and no longer seek truth 
there, but should return to the living fountain of the 
divine in themselves. 

The Address stirred the waters of controversy. The 
authorities of the Divinity School felt it necessary to 
disown the opinions set forth. Dr. Ware, the friend 
and predecessor of Emerson in the Old North Church, 
preached a kindly sermon, defining the serious nature 
of the bearing of these ideas in subverting Christianity, 
and Dr. Andrews Norton denounced them as an irrup- 
tion of German atheism in the community. There 
were many pamphlets, discourses, and criticisms. 
Emerson stood aloof from all, seemingly indifferent 
though annoyed by the publicity that the agitation 
caused. Dr. Ware, however, drew from him a re- 






ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 57 

markably plain statement of his intellectual method 
and the ground of his conviction in general. He 
wrote, in reply to a friendly letter, excusing himself 
from any polemical statement : " I could not give 
account of myself if challenged. I could not pos- 
sibly give you one of the ' arguments' you cruelly 
hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands ; for 
I do not know what arguments mean in reference to 
any expression of a thought. I delight in telling 
what I think ; but if you ask me how I dare say so, 
or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal 
men." The claim of intuition to immediate know- 
ledge could not be more lucidly presented than in this 
declaration. 

Emerson loved the church. He never ceased to be 
at heart a minister ; he was preaching at this time in 
Unitarian pulpits, and he continued to preach, though 
with diminishing frequency, for nine years after this 
Address. He seems never to have understood why his 
doctrines could not be consistently put forth at the 
Christian assembly on the Sabbath, for he regarded 
the Sabbath and the office of preaching as the greatest 
benefits that Christianity had transmitted to the social 
life. He valued traditional religion in a threefold 
way. He retained the sentiment for the old-time 
Sabbath day and often refers to its disappearance 
with regret, both for its atmosphere of external quiet 
and for its devotional joy in the gathered congre- 
gations in the meeting-houses. He retained also a 
deeply founded respect for the old-fashioned Calvin- 
ism of his ancestry, as a form of strong character and 
fervid piety. "What a debt is ours to that old 
religion," he exclaims, "which in the childhood of 



58 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

most of us still dwelt like a Sabbath morning in 
the country of New England, teaching privation, self- 
denial, and sorrow. A man was born not for pros- 
perity, but to suffer for the benefit of others, like the 
noble rock-maple which all around our villages bleeds 
for the service of man. Not praise, not men's accept- 
ance of our doing, but the spirit's holy errand through 
us absorbed the thought. How dignified was this ! " 
It is a sincere motion of- patriotism, of faith to the 
country of our origins, that beats in this passage — 
the voice of an old dweller on the soil ; and this re- 
spect, that is half sad affection, Emerson was rich in. 
Lastly, he valued traditional religion in a less attrac- 
tive way, as a concession to a lower type of intelli- 
gence and culture, as the best of which its adherents 
were capable of receiving, and as, at its lowest, a 
useful police power. There was this much of accom- 
modation in his mind. He had made Carlyle's dis- 
covery of "the fool-part of man," and ten years 
before this time he had applied it to the interpreta- 
tions of Scripture given by the New Jerusalem Church. 
"The interpretation is doubtless wholly false," he 
says, " and if the fool-part of man must have the lie, 
if truth is a pill that can't go down till it is sugared 
with superstition, — why, then I will forgive the last, 
in the belief that truth will enter into the soul so 
natively and assimilantly that it will become part 
of the soul, and so remain when the falsehood be- 
comes dry and peels off." A similar view remained 
in his mind with regard to all forms of religious 
teaching, and harmonized with that invincible pre- 
disposition to value ideas for their moral energy 
rather than their intellectual purity, for their effect 



ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 59 

on life rather than their mental precision. In this 
spirit, and from a position conscious of superiority, 
he saw traditional religion continue in another level 
of life with content and even satisfaction. But when- 
ever he spoke, despite his attachments to the old faith 
in these various ways, he advanced an attack, how- 
ever disguised in many forms, upon the establishment 
of Christianity ; he sapped its bases in the mind, and on 
all occasions, whatever his topic, preached the divine 
authority of the soul itself in all life, free of, every 
form of priest or creed or ritual, of church or Saviour, 
or of any God other than the inflowing divine essence 
whose operation is impersonal, private, and unshared 
with any other. Orthodoxy was a strong power in 
New England and comprised the mass of the people ; 
his own sect of Unitarianism excluded him from their 
ranks, with the exception of a small group of radicals 
and their associates ; it is not strange that, in such 
circumstances, Emerson, after the delivery of this 
Address, was commonly regarded as atheistical, anti- 
Christian, and dangerous. Condemnation was the more 
unqualified because attention was naturally given at 
first rather to what he denied than to what he af- 
firmed; what he denied, all men understood; but what 
he affirmed, few, if any, clearly made out. 

A third notable Address, not because of any imme- 
diate stir it caused, but on account of its containing 
something supplementary to his view of Nature pre- 
viously exposed and also introducing a new quality 
to its substance, was given at Waterville College, 
Maine, August 11, 1841. It was entitled TJie 
Method of Nature. In this he elaborates the general 
statement that Nature works not to particular ends but 



60 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

to a universe of ends ; her superabundance of energy- 
is such that particular ends become insignificant and 
indifferent ; and this whirl without special direction 
Emerson denominates " the ecstasy of Nature." It is 
to be observed that he here specifically denies that 
man is the first end of creation ; it appears to him that 
the actual product, man as he is, or as he has been, is 
a result altogether inadequate to such an apparatus of 
an entire universe to prepare him. Nature is therefore 
regarded as an inexhaustible overflow of power without 
determination, — pure energy. In this aspect she and 
her ways are held up as a model for human life. It is 
affirmed that life should be characterized similarly by 
an ecstasy, a release of power as such, without solici- 
tude for particular ends to be achieved. Life, in fact, 
is said to lose itself in determinate action, for the 
action limits it progressively, the end comes to be 
an enslaving element, at last it destroys the energy 
which has its finality in it. " I say to you plainly," 
he declares, " there is no end to which your practical 
faculty can aim so sound or so large that, if pursued for 
itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to 
the nostril." Life lies in tendency, in quality, in the 
release of energy, not in its results, not in deeds, not 
in successes. The purpose of this advice is to throw 
the soul back on its own being, as the main of life, to 
save it from the self-limitation inherent in applied 
power, from specialization, from preoccupation with 
particular causes, from anxiety for practical effects ; the 
soul should rejoice in its power, should retain its power, 
above all things, and should ignore ends as things 
that may be left to take care of themselves after 
Nature's fashion. The term "ecstasy" is intended 



ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 61 

specifically to mark this mood of oblivion to results, 
this absorption in the sense and exercise of power, 
this exaltation of the working energy in itself, as the 
primary value of life ; love and genius are dwelt on as 
the greater forms of this energy, but the weight of the 
thought goes to depreciate the practical and earthly 
affairs of the soul as things essentially indifferent and 
on a lower plane than its own being. Apart from its 
general interest, the Address explains and in a sense 
defends Emerson's habitual withdrawal from practical 
projects of reform and his apparent indifference to 
the effect of his words upon the society about him. It 
contains, like all his opinions, a personal point of view. 
Emerson delivered other Addresses, neighbouring 
these in time and matter : Literary Ethics at Dart- 
mouth College, 1838 ; Man the Reformer, TJie Times, 
TJie Conservative, at Boston, in 1841 ; The Tran- 
scendentalist, in 1842, and The Young American in 
1844, also at Boston. They contain further illus- 
tration and elaboration of these leading ideas. He 
also gave courses of lectures in Boston. The cir- 
cle that he reached was, however, not large. Na- 
ture , his single book, sold only five hundred copies 
in twelve years. His audiences were generally from 
three hundred to five hundred persons, and are said 
to have been the same persons year after year. The 
propaganda of his views was therefore limited. His 
influence was of the intensive kind. It is described 
by most of those who have reported their impression, 
rather as an effect on the spirit than on the mind ; 
whether the ideas were valid, or precisely what they 
were, might be a matter of doubt even then and there, 
but "they did the hearers good." It was an enfran- 



62 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

chising power that Emerson put forth, a liberation 
that he accomplished; and, secondly, and hardly 
less, it was a stimulating power felt in invigorating 
the confidence and hopes of the party of intellectual 
advance and especially of the young and ardent souls, 
many of whom were isolated in the community. He 
made for liberalism in all its forms. He did not 
endeavour to replace old ways with a new confession 
and rite ; he merely supplied a spirit to those suscept- 
ible of it, who for one reason or another were left to 
self-guidance and came under his influence. 

In his general position, Emerson represents in re- 
ligion the substitution of philosophical for theological 
thought. There comes a time in human develop- 
ment when the more thoughtful of mankind reject the 
mytholog}^ which under whatever form the race has 
inherited from its past ; theogonies and all their ap- 
paratus are disregarded as outworn, and in their place a 
metaphysical explanation of the universe is set up, in 
which the universe is contemplated not as being in the 
order of time, of history, but in the present as it must 
always be, sub specie etemitatis, an eternal Now. This 
step out of the past into the present, out of theology 
into philosophy, out of mythology into metaphysics, 
was taken by Emerson. He is the sole important 
representative of this stage in American literature ; 
that is his true significance. He was the incarna- 
tion of the moment of change, and by the genius of his 
temperament and the accident of his situation so per- 
fectly adapted to embody and express it that his ideas 
seem phases of his own soul, parts of his personality. 
He is integral with his thought. His defects even, as 
they must seem from one point of view, gave greater 



ii.] "NATURE" AND ITS COROLLARIES 63 

purity to his qualities as the interpreter of the 
moment of change. He was, for example, destitute of 
the historic sense ; he saw life in one dimension only, 
in the plane of the present, the Now of the metaphy- 
sicians. This partly accounts for his contented disre- 
gard of the past with its vast accumulations, for 
the slight value he placed on the things of old civiliza- 
tion, on its art, for example, as well as on its religion, 
and for his slackened hold on the institutional life 
of the race through its entire range. It accounts, 
too, for his native sympathy with lonely and especially 
early minds which have something primitive and 
released from contemporaneity in their greatness, in 
whose presence as in reading classic books he felt that 
time was abolished. A raw and provincial commu- 
nity and the democracy were his natural milieu. He 
was emancipated from Europe by his birth, and he 
was never naturalized there by his culture. Yet all 
of which he was denuded in rejecting the past, and 
whatever else by omission simplified him and made 
him more elementary as a man, suggests the more his 
likeness to those early Greek thinkers, whom he often 
recalls, who' were not dissimilarly placed with respect 
to old religion in newly colonized lands and an un- 
ecclesiastic democracy, and who, strangers to the sci- 
entific intellect and the historic sense alike, first gave 
out physics and metaphysics intertangled, and substi- 
tuted in the schools the myth of reason for the myth 
of old faith. At all events it is necessary to recog- 
nize in Emerson, though in a far different time and 
place, such an emancipator. 



CHAPTEE III 

"the hypocritic days" 

When Emerson settled in Concord in the honse 
which, was his home thereafter, lying on the outskirts 
of the village and not far from woods and wild pas- 
ture, he found himself in a situation well adapted to 
his needs and was perhaps more truly among his 
own people than he had ever been. The long associ- 
ation of his family with the town and his frequent 
residence there had made him acquainted with the 
community almost family by family ; he was neither 
a stranger nor among strangers, but was felt by all to 
belong there as one of themselves. He led the ordi- 
nary life of a democratic citizen, interesting himself in 
his neighbours and in town affairs; notwithstanding the 
unpopularity of his opinions, he was deeply respected, 
and on the few occasions when any annoyance was 
directed against him, it was obviated by his friends with- 
out any intervention of his own. He lectured for his 
fellow-citizens at least once every year. He served on 
the board of the School Committee and of the Library, 
was one of the managers of the Lyceum, a member of 
the Social Circle, and on all proper occasions took the 
public part of a leading citizen and was often the 
spokesman of the town. He attended the town-meet- 
ing, though he rarely took part in it. He liked to 
meet men of all sorts in their natural pursuits and 

64 



chap, in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 65 

occupations, and enjoyed the rough reality of their per- 
sonalities ; he observedthem more closely than was real- 
ized, and in his walks or in the stage-coach, which was 
then the means of communication with Boston, or in his 
commonplace contact with them in small affairs, he had 
ample opportunity for democratic fraternalism. He 
was, however, a minister and a scholar, and knew and 
respected the barrier thus established between him 
and them, and did not attempt to mix with them famil- 
iarly ; his manners of themselves would have forbade 
it. He was not, in spite of this respectful distance, 
either by his habits or his interests, remote from 
the townsmen, like a hermit or an aristocrat ; on the 
contrary, he was naturally keen for human commu- 
nication, and most enjoyed it in the form of character 
rather than of conversation. He was always interested 
in the business of men. 

His life, nevertheless, was not in their sphere. He 
spent his time in his own family and in solitude. He 
worked in the morning and evening in his study, 
together from eight to nine hours ; in the afternoon 
he took a walk in the country. He often preached on 
Sunday in the earlier years, and he gave lectures in 
Boston and in neighbouring places. His means were 
straitened in comparison with his necessary ex- 
penses, and he lived economically as well as plainly. 
He gave a succinct account of his worldly estate to 
Carlyle, in a letter, May 10, 1838, but the statement 
holds good for a period of years : — 

"I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres 
only of God's earth ; on which is my house, my kitchen-gar- 
den, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My 
house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in 
it 



66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, twenty-two thou- 
sand dollars whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I 
have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter 
lectures, which was last winter eight hundred dollars. Well, 
with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay 
at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have food, 
warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am 
rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. 
As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of free- 
dom to spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither 
ami, who am not wise. But at home, I am rich, — rich 
enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation 
of Christianity, — I call her Asia, — and keeps my philos- 
ophy from Antinomianism ; my mother, whitest, mildest, 
most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her uni- 
versal preference for old things is her son ; my boy, a piece 
of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning 
to night ; — these, and three domestic women, who cook 
and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I 
sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far 
as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result : 
paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repel- 
lent particle." 

He added to his realty by the purchase of adjoining 
land until his estate comprised nine acres, and he also 
bought a considerable wild tract of wood and pasture 
by Walden Pond where he liked to walk and meditate. 

Emerson's position in the eyes of the larger com- 
munity outside is fairly described by James Free- 
man Clarke : " The majority of the sensible, practical 
community regarded him as mystical, as crazy or affected, 
or as an imitator of Carlyle, as racked and revolution- 
ary, as a fool, as one who did not himself know what 
he meant. A small but determined minority, chiefly 
composed of young men and women, admired him and 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 67 

believed in him, took him for their guide, teacher, and 
master." He himself feared that his public audiences 
would diminish at his lectures in Boston, in conse- 
quence of the obloquy visited upon his name in many 
quarters, and in the winter after the Divinity School 
Address this was the case. In private he was, by 
general consent if not by open avowal, the centre of 
thought of the transcendentalism then active and ambi- 
tious. Its chief organization, if one may so describe 
it, was the Transcendental Club, which, originating in 
a conversation of Emerson and some of his friends on 
the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the 
founding of Harvard College, first met in Boston at the 
home of Mr. Eipley, September 19, 1836, and afterward 
held other meetings at the homes of its members in 
Boston and the neighbouring towns. It was a means 
of assembling the stronger and more ambitious inquir- 
ers for the purpose of conversation which took the 
form of monologue rather than discussion, one speaker 
holding forth after another, according to the half- 
humorous accounts that have come down concerning 
its proceedings. Its members were very respectable 
persons, and several of them became at least locally 
distinguished in later life. Emerson was, of course, 
one of the main stays of this friendly association and 
a most interested listener. 

In this club, or in the sympathies and hopes which 
there found cultivation, originated the project of a 
periodical publication which should be an organ of 
expression for all the free thought of the time and act 
upon the public so far as the community might be ac- 
cessible to influence in this way. The proposal was 
long considered and apparently with some timidity 



68 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

and lack of confidence from the beginning. The re- 
sult was the publication of TJie Dial as a quarterly 
magazine for " literature, philosophy, and religion." 
The first number was issued July, 1840, and its precari- 
ous existence was maintained until April, 1844, when 
it expired. Margaret Fuller was the literary editor, to 
whom Emerson acted as adviser ; and on her relin- 
quishing the task after two years, he became sole 
editor. The magazine brought forward some new au- 
thors, particularly Thoreau, who there found his first 
audience, and contained much of Emerson's and of 
Margaret Fuller's writings beside contributions from 
many capable pens. It was, however, intended to be 
an organ of free thought in a very generous sense, 
and the general effect it made upon its few readers 
was disconcerting. Emerson himself is apologetic, but 
prizes it as an expression of "youthfulness" ; Carlyle, 
who described it well enough as " all spirit-like, aeri- 
form, aurora-borealis like," bitted himself with his best 
manners in striving to make polite mention of receiv- 
ing it. There was some excellent substance in it, but 
this was lost in the cloud of feebleness which befogged 
the time. The Dial may be said to survive only as 
one of the curiosities of our literature and on account 
of Emerson's connection with it. His only other 
association with a periodical was as the writer of the 
opening address of the Massachusetts Quarterly in 
1847 ; though his name appeared as an associate editor 
upon its covers, he had nothing further to do with it, 
and the name was soon withdrawn. 

Brook Farm was another experiment which had its 
origin in the Transcendental Club. Its history has 
been elaborately written. It was an attempt to or- 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 69 

ganize a socialistic group in the community, of which 
elsewhere there were other examples, and was espe- 
cially notable because of the men afterward of distinc- 
tion who were associated with it. Emerson was among 
those who were first consulted by the founder, Mr. 
Ripley, and gave some thought to it. But he did not 
vary from his customary rule of withholding from 
association with any particular project of reform. 
He did not object to the practical application by 
others of theoretic ideas, and even made some experi- 
ments of a personal sort himself. He adopted vege- 
tarianism, in some form, or at least a novel and 
Spartan diet, but he soon gave it up ; he proposed to 
have only one table at his home at which the servants 
should also eat, but he was saved from this by the re- 
fusal of the cook ; he applied himself to manual labour, 
but this also he abandoned as a folly for any man of 
mind. He found himself observant, in larger matters, 
of Fourierism and other projects of social reorganiza- 
tion ; property was an institution, inherited from the 
past, no more sacred than other institutions, and there 
was only too much reason to believe that it contained 
large elements of injustice. But he was constitution- 
ally an individualist, and incapable of allying himself 
with a socialistic scheme ; the whole action of his 
mind was against such an organization. He indulged 
the hypothesis of a general renovation of society ; but 
his objection to all reform, which he always looked at 
dubiously in the concrete, was its partial and particular 
nature. He dwelt in his own soul and truly desired 
that all the world that was his world should depend 
on that. " It would please me," he wrote, " to accept 
no church, school, state, or society which did not 



70 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

found itself in my own nature." But "this rotten 
system of property" was only a part of a more far- 
reaching corruption, one item of the manifold separa- 
tion of life from the inward reality. " Diet, medicine, 
traffic, books, social intercourse, and all the rest of 
our practices and usages are equally divorced from 
ideas, are empirical and false." He could do his work 
in the world quite as well in his own Concord house 
as in any community socialistically organized; nor 
did the ends of the community, essentially economic 
ends, appear to him sufficiently spiritual in essence. 
It seemed a scheme to provide comfort and conven- 
ience on the scale of a large hotel. The more he 
thought about it, the less he liked it. He consulted 
his neighbour, Farmer Hosmer, who advised him that 
"gentleman-farming" would not pay. He wrote to 
Mr. Eipley and declined to join in the enterprise ; but 
he remained an interested spectator of the progress 
and trials of the group from its beginning in 1841 to 
its end in 1847. 

A more difficult subject to meet was the question of 
Anti-Slavery. Here was a reform upon which it was 
necessary for every thoughtful citizen to take sides. 
Emerson was not unfamiliar with the South ; he had 
roomed with a Southerner in college, and he had jour- 
neyed in slave-holding states. He was humane and 
enlightened, and had already shown his disposition 
by opening his church to Anti-Slavery meetings in Bos- 
ton; and at the time of the visit of Harriet Marti- 
neau, in 1835, he had befriended her, sustained her 
cause, and received her in his home. He desired the 
abolition of slavery, and in private and as an individ- 
ual on all proper occasions he spoke out in defence 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 71 

of the negroes. But he did not see his way to joining 
the organization f Or abolition, the Anti-Slavery Society. 
He was not one of those who take the burden of the 
world upon their shoulders; he never assumed any 
responsibility for the universe ; he was content to do 
what he could to alleviate life in his neighbourhood ; 
but in the presence of the great miseries of the world 
he was dumb. This was, in part, a practical view and 
consonant with his nature ; he carefully guarded the 
peculiarity of his own mind, its self-possession, or 
absorption in its own ideas, and especially the one 
method by which he might affect the world as a writer 
by announcing the infinitude of the soul in its moral 
nature ; he looked to the total regeneration of the soul 
in itself, to truth as a general, original, and unmodi- 
fied power, not to particular applied measures and 
special remedies for the ills of nature, of life, or of 
the state. He exercised, so to speak, a constant inhi- 
bition of the particular part of life with the aim 
thereby to reconcentrate force in the unconfined soul 
which is the source and master of all life; the in- 
crease of its native energy was more important than 
any of its works. To preach this was, he thought, 
his peculiar business, which no one else was much 
concerned about, and whatever withdrew him from it 
was a distraction, enfeeblement, and loss. 

The Anti-Slavery movement, however, was too large 
a part of the social and political life of the nation to 
allow such neglect as might be permitted by inferior 
causes. It came home to men's doors, to their self- 
respect, their love of their country, their sense of hu- 
man right and of national honour. Emerson, though 
slowly and in a sense unwillingly, took a part increas- 



72 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

ing in activity and intensity in proportion to the 
growth and spread of the agitation. He first spoke 
on the subject of slavery at Concord in the vestry of 
the Second Church in November, 1837, and again in 
the Concord Court House, August 1, 1844, on the anni- 
versary of the liberation of the slaves in the British 
West Indies, and a year later on the same anniversary 
at Waltham. He took part in public meetings at 
Concord, January 26, 1845, remonstrating against the 
expulsion of his fellow-townsman, Samuel Hoar, by a 
mob from Charleston, South Carolina, whither he had 
gone as the accredited representative of Massachu- 
setts to protect the rights of her negro citizens, and 
also, September 22, remonstrating against the annexa- 
tion of Texas. On May 3, 1851, he addressed the 
citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law, and he 
repeated this speech on several occasions on the stump 
in the campaign for his Congressional district, meet- 
ing there in Cambridge for the first time " the hisses, 
shouts, and cat-calls " of politics. On March 7, 1854, 
he made an address in New York on the same subject, 
and gave a new lecture on slavery in January, 1855, 
in Boston, in which he advocated emancipation by the 
purchase of the slaves by the nation. In May, 1856, 
he spoke at Concord at the public meeting on the 
occasion of the assault on Sumner in the Senate 
Chamber at Washington, and in September at Cam- 
bridge in behalf of the arming of Kansas settlers, to 
which cause he also contributed money. In 1857 he 
received John Brown in his house at Concord, and in 
his lecture in Boston, November 8, 1859, when Brown 
was lying under sentence of death in Virginia, he 
spoke of him as "that new saint than whom none 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 73 

purer or more brave was ever led by love of man into 
conflict and death, — the new saint awaiting his mar- 
tyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the 
gallows glorious like the cross." The words were 
long remembered. He took part in several Brown 
meetings then held in Boston and the neighbourhood, 
and it was in connection with this affair that he 
resembled most distinctly an agitator with the zeal 
of one. He had been known as a Free-soiler in poli- 
tics, but he was now classed by public opinion with 
the abolitionists. The last occasion on which he was 
called upon to appear in this cause was at the annual 
meetiug of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 
January 24, 1861, in Boston; he rose to speak, but 
he was howled down by the mob, and after several 
attempts withdrew. 

In these repeated addresses he spoke with increas- 
ing force and decision, and when stirred he was gifted 
with that eloquence that goes home to its mark. His 
denunciation was uncompromising, as when he said of 
Webster, whom he had revered from boyish days, — 
" All the drops of his blood have eyes that look down- 
ward." His' counsel was direct, as when he declared 
that the Fugitive Slave Law "is a law which every one 
of you will break on the earliest occasion, — a law 
whicli no man can obey or abet the obeying without 
loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of 
gentleman." His speeches were sown with sentences 
that were maxims, — " He who writes a crime into the 
statute-book digs under the foundations of the Capitol ; " 
and with sharp appeals that stung like insults, — 
"The famous town of Boston is his master's hound." 
Perhaps no spoken words of his were more instant in 



74 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

eloquent effect than the sentences which he injected 
into his lecture on Heroism at Boston in the early 
days of 1838 ; when he suddenly said, looking up from 
his manuscript : " The day never shines in which this 
element may not work. ... It is but the other day that 
the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a 
mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and 
died when it was better not to live." In that quiet 
hall the sentence rang like a rifle-shot. It is, however, 
useless to multiply examples of his quality in such de- 
bate. His civic courage was flawless, and he was never 
more effective as a speaker than in handling these live 
topics. He did not, however, associate himself much 
with the abolitionist agitators, for the ways of many 
of whom he had little sympathy and still less for their 
suggested methods of political action. He had a true 
and profound respect for Garrison as a man, and per- 
haps he was least contented, taken all in all, with 
Wendell Phillips. His letter to the President on the 
removal of the Cherokees from Georgia, sent April 18, 
1838, and his welcome to Kossuth at Concord, May 11, 
1852, were the only other notable civic actions of this 
period. It is in his conduct as an opponent of slavery 
that Emerson revealed his height as a citizen and par- 
ticipant in the public affairs of his generation. 

Emerson's service to the Anti-Slavery cause must 
be gauged by the inertia of his reluctant nature which 
he overcame in entering on the active strife. He 
speaks of an analogous reluctance in lecturing, which 
he even described at times as a kind of "charlatanry." 
He meant that sense of an accommodation to the world 
which is inherent in all action, that adaptation of truth 
to time and place and the minds of the hearers, all 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 75 

of the concession there is in popularizing truth, in 
seasoning it with anecdote and allusion, all the artifice 
there is in the handling an idea persuasively instead 
of trusting simply to its pure self, and also, and 
perhaps more intimately, the sense of desecration of 
the truth by its utterance which is a not uncommon 
feeling in highly intellectualized and aloof natures like 
his own. It is better not to act, but to contain the 
soul; it is better not to speak, but to refrain the word : 
this is the mood to which his entire philosophy as a 
spiritual life initiated him ; yet what he remarks of 
this sort is to be lightly taken. In another part of 
his nature he liked to feel himself as the communi- 
cator of truth ; he liked, too, the act of preaching, 
which was his natural office, born and bred in him, 
exercised and breathed by him, and his sole outlet 
into action ; though he had thrown off the harness, 
he liked to move in the old motions. He gradually 
abandoned speaking as a pulpit preacher and confined 
himself to the platform ; but he never ceased to be, in 
garb and manner, the preacher. He lectured much ; 
whatever was the announced subject of the winter 
course in Boston, the substance was the same ; and, 
more importantly, the man was the same. " We do 
not go," wrote Lowell, " to hear what Emerson says 
so much as to hear Emerson." His account of the 
actual scene is by far the best : — 

" We used to walk in from the country to the Masonic 
Temple (I think it was), through the crisp winter night, and 
listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle 
meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to 
the hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and 
rescue. Cynics might say what they liked. Did our own 



76 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

imaginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into ambro- 
sia ? At any rate, he brought us life, which, on the whole, is 
no bad thing. Was it all transcendentalism? magic-lantern 
pictures on mist? As you will. Those, then, were just 
what we wanted. But it was not so. The delight and the 
benefit were that he put us in communication w r ith a larger 
style of thought, sharpened our wits with a more pungent 
phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the 
dry husk of our New England ; made us conscious of the 
supreme and everlasting originality of whatever bit of soul 
might be in any of us ; freed us, in short, from the stocks of 
prose in which we had sat so long that we had grown w T ell- 
nigh contented in our cramps. And who that saw the au- 
dience will ever forget it, where every one still capable of 
fire, or longing to renew in himself the half-forgotten sense 
of it, was gathered? Those faces, young and old, agleam 
with pale intellectual light, eager with pleased attention, 
flash upon me once more from the deep recesses of the years 
with an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, brim- 
ming with love and hope, wholly vanished now in that other 
world we call the Past, or peering doubtfully through the 
pensive gloaming of memory, your light impoverishes these 
cheaper days ! I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they 
turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some 
keener flash of that humor which always played about the 
horizon of his mind like heat-lightning, and it seems now 
like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves that are whirling 
around me. 

" . . .To some of us that long-past experience remains as 
the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emer- 
son awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It 
is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, 
careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the 
ballad of Chevy Chase and we in Emerson. Nor did it 
blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of victory. Did 
they say he was disconnected? So were the stars, that 
seemed larger to our eyes, still keen with that excitement, as 
we walked homeward with prouder stride over the creaking 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 77 

snow. And were they not knit together by a higher logic 
than our mere sense could master? Were we enthusiasts? 
I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man 
who made us worth something for once in our lives. If 
asked what was left? what we carried home? we should 
not have been careful for an answer. It would have been 
enough if we had said that something beautiful had passed 
that way. Or we might have asked in return what one 
brought away from a symphony of Beethoven ? Enough 
that he had set that ferment of wholesome discontent at 
work in us. 

"... I have heard some great speakers and some ac- 
complished orators, but never any that so moved and per- 
suaded men as he. There is a kind of undertow in that rich 
baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold 
into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would not 
resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long-studied 
artist in these things) does the deliberate utterance, that 
seems waiting for the fit word, appear to admit us partners 
in the labor of thought and make us feel as if the glance of 
humor were a sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase 
lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to him 
as to us. In that closely filed speech of his at the Burns 
centenary dinner, every word seemed to have just dropped 
down to him from the clouds. He looked far away over the 
heads of his hearers, with a vague kind of expectation, 
as into some private heaven of invention, and the 
winged period came at last obedient to his spell. ' My 
dainty Ariel ! ' he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast 
down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of approval 
and caught another sentence from the Sibylline leaves that 
lay before him, ambushed behind a dish of fruit and seen 
only by nearest neighbors. Every sentence brought down 
the house, as I never saw one brought down before, — and 
it is not so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has 
no hint of native brogue in it. I watched, for it was an 
interesting study, how the quick sympathy ran flashing from 
face to face down the long tables, like an electric spark 
thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of 



78 RALPH WALDO EMEKSON [chap. 

plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, 
found myself caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my 
excited fancy set me under the bema listening to him who 
fulmined over Greece. I can never help applying to him 
what Ben Jon son said of Bacon : ' There happened in my 
time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his 
speaking. His language was nobly censorious. No man 
ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or 
suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. 
No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. 
His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without 
loss. He commanded where he spoke.' " 

Another view is given by Willis from a different 
angle, and completes the picture : — 

"Emerson's voice is up to his reputation. It has a curi- 
ous contradiction in it which we tried in vain to analyze 
satisfactorily. But it is noble, altogether. And what seems 
strange is to hear such a voice proceeding from such a body. 
It is a voice with shoulders in it, which he has not ; with 
lungs in it far larger than his; with a walk which the 
public never see; with a fist in it which his own hand 
never gave him the model for ; and with a gentleman in it 
which his parochial and ' bare-necessaries-of-lif e ' sort of 
exterior gives no other betrayal of. We can imagine noth- 
ing in nature (which seems too to have a type for everything) 
like the want of correspondence between the Emerson that 
goes in at the eye and the Emerson that goes in at the 
ear. . . . Indeed (to use one of his own similitudes), his 
body seems ' never to have broken the umbilical cord ' which 
held it to Boston ; while his soul has sprung to the adult 
stature of a child of the universe, and his voice is the 
utterance of the soul only." 

This recalls Alcott's remark that some of Emerson's 
" organs were free, some fated ; the voice was entirely 
liberated." It was, says his son, " agreeable, flexible, 
and varied, with power unexpected from a man of his 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 79 

slender chest/' Its effect was supplemented, however, 
by the tranquil decorum of the speaker, by the power 
of his large-featured face, and the light of the spirit 
that shone from the serene and expressive counte- 
nance; moreover, he had high-bred manners at all 
times, and solemnity. 

He was more sought for as the years passed on, and 
after 1850 he was accustomed to make a journey to 
the West each year, lecturing in the lyceums there. 
These journeys were fatiguing and abounded in hard- 
ships of travel, in exposure to cold and storm and in- 
conveniences of lodging. He did not complain, but 
made the best of rude conditions, and returned better 
in health after each expedition. He crossed the 
Mississippi several times on the ice, on foot or partly 
by boat, as the case might be, and he had long drives 
on the prairie in snow and mud, and adventures in 
canal boats and taverns. His love of the primitive was 
appealed to by this contact with weather and char- 
acter, and an appreciation of the West was formed in 
him such as no other man of letters possessed ; it 
cannot be doubted that the broad American strain in 
his writings, which distinguishes them, owed much to 
this development by repeated contact through a series 
of years with hard and raw conditions, and the race 
growing up in them. The fact that he found an 
audience in these then somewhat remote places illus- 
trates the mode by which the New England spirit 
penetrated the West. He was received, it would ap- 
pear, in, much the same mixed way there as in the 
East, with a limited enthusiasm, an awakened interest 
and curiosity, and also with some vague astonishment 
of mind and dubious listening. For the growth of his 



80 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

reputation at large in the country and for the infiltra- 
tion of his thought into liberal and intelligent minds 
these lecturing tours were of the first consequence, 
and it was rather by the spoken than the written word 
that he first gained the attention of his countrymen. 
He continued to lecture regularly until after the Civil 
War; it was his means of earning, and the active 
period of such influence extended over forty years. 

The various public employments of Emerson con- 
stituted his external life which was filled with inter- 
esting action, keeping him in unbroken contact with 
affairs and men. It may be said that nearly every 
eminent man of his neighbourhood and generation was 
his respectful friend, and in his study at Concord the 
higher interests of society were often in play. Yet in 
the midst of all this he led a private life, altogether 
his own, in the family about him, which he most 
valued. Here he was at home, and here also he was 
in that solitude which was, to his eyes and in his 
heart, the place of his genius. It is only at Concord 
that one obtains a near and private view of him, and 
it is given principally by the recollections of his son. 
His mother lived with him for eighteen years until 
her death, and her room, where the children went for 
their Bible readings on Sunday, was a chamber of 
peace. Besides the firstborn son, there were another 
son and two daughters ; but the eldest died at the 
age of five years. He was a beautiful child, with 
dark blue eyes and long lashes, and would stay si- 
lently in his father's study for hours. He was pecul- 
iarly dear to Emerson, and the loss was a great grief. 
Miss Alcott's first memory of him was on the occasion 
of the boy's death : — 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 81 

" My first remembrance is of the morning when I was sent 
to inquire for little Waldo, then lying very ill. His father 
came to me, so worn with watching and changed by sorrow, 
that I was startled, and could only stammer out my mes- 
sage. 'Child, he is dead ! ' was his answer. Then the door 
closed, and I ran home to tell the sad tidings. I was only 
eight years old, and that was my first glimpse of a great 
grief, but I never have forgotten the anguish that made a 
familiar face so tragical, and gave those few words more 
pathos than the sweet lamentation of the Threnody." 

Emerson, however, after the bereavement, passed 
into a state of resignation with respect to it, in which 
the mysteriousness of the event was the abiding trait, 
so that he used in a lecture these words about it : 
"Grief, too, will make us idealists. In the death of 
my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have 
lost a beautiful estate, — no more. I cannot get it 
nearer to me." He means that his own soul has suf- 
fered no loss, as if it were his own " eternal part " 
that was made plain to him in the experience. His 
natural grief was not the less, and indeed this 
seems to have been the greatest shock that life gave 
him. He was fond of children, and inexpert with 
his hands in other ways was skilful in handling- 
babies; he liked the company of the young always, 
and drew no line of age or of intelligence in their case. 
As his own children grew up, he gave unusual atten- 
tion to them and made them companions, and was not 
only firm but thoughtful in discipline, using ways of 
avoidance and prevention before trouble came or dis- 
sipating it by turning the channel of attention with 
something like a woman's tact. He took interest in 
their games and studies and affairs, and was their con- 
fidant; and if he bred them seriously, it was with 



82 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

much liberality. He required of his sou, for example, 
regular reading of Plutarch's Lives, and he discour- 
aged morning idleness even on holidays. He repressed 
light conversation even on their childish romances of 
boy and girl, and especially on the subject of death, 
and ill nature or silliness was rebuked or frowned upon. 
He did not romp with them, but he took them to walk, 
especially on Sunday afternoons, when he came into 
the room at four o'clock and whistled or spoke as a 
signal ; and then all would go out into the fields and 
woods, where he would show them the first flowers or 
repeat old ballads or amuse them in other ways. He 
liked them to go to church, and they were taught 
hymns as he had been ; they were allowed on Sunday 
to stroll by themselves and to read and even to go 
bathing in Walden ; but not to play games, to have 
toys, or to drive or row. He disliked card-playing at 
all times. When they grew to be thirteen or fourteen, 
he allowed them much latitude in their own affairs, 
and developed their initiation and responsibility. He 
had their companions into the house for parties, was 
anxious that all should come, and interested himself 
in their entertainment. It is plain that children were 
the light of the house. 

He was himself in these years of maturity usually in 
good health, though he had somewhat the temperament 
of a valitudinarian, owing to his invalidism in younger 
days, and he perhaps underrated his physical strength 
and consequently indulged the more his rambling and 
country habits ; he did not overtax himself. He had 
a horror of invalidism, and would never permit talk 
about sickness. His son thus describes him in these 
years : " Mr. Emerson was tall, — six feet in his 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 83 

shoes, — erect until his latter days, neither very thin 
nor stout in frame, with rather narrow and unusually 
sloping shoulders, and long neck, but very well-poised 
head, and a dignity of carriage. His eyes were very 
blue, his hair dark brown, his complexion clear and 
always with good colour. His features were pro- 
nounced, but refined, and his face very much modelled, 
as a sculptor would say." The portraits of him show 
the general character of his face excellently. His 
manner of address was courteous, in the old sense, 
and hesitating, which Hawthorne best struck off, — 
"and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, 
encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive 
more than he would impart." It was a sincere attitude, 
for nothing was more characteristic of him, as Dr. 
Furness tells it, than " the eagerness and delight with 
which he magnified the slightest appearance of any- 
thing like talent or genius or good that he happened 
to discover, or that he fancied he discovered in an- 
other." In demeanour he was always reserved, as he 
had been in boyhood, and he disliked to have this 
habit, which, was a state rather than a mask, at all 
shaken. He complained that Margaret Fuller made 
him laugh too much. He never laughed aloud, but the 
suppressed commotion of his lungs and face on being 
affected with laughter has often been humorously and 
vividly portrayed. He had hidden humour, which is 
apt to take the form of irony in writing, and he was 
amused in secret over many things ; in his family he 
would joke after a scriptural fashion by perverse 
quotation of Bible texts, and he is said to have en- 
joyed the parody of his poem Br amah, that was 
then current. It was a clerical and Yankee humour 



84 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

that he had, and was not allowed to encroach upon the 
day; and, besides, there is much silence in Yankee 
humour of the true breed. He was not fond of pictures, 
and enjoyed design more than colour. He had no ear 
for music, and could not distinguish simple tunes from 
one another, though he enjoyed singing in a moderate 
degree. He did not care for garden flowers, and if he 
brought home flowers from the woods he did not fur- 
ther notice them or what was done with them. In 
outdoor habits he still skated in winter and swam in 
Walden on hot days in summer; he did not ride horse- 
back, though he could do so, and he did not enjoy 
driving, but on going to preach in the neighbourhood 
he generally drove himself. He preferred walking 
even between stations in the city, and would stride away, 
alert and swift, carrying his own bag. He had coun- 
try habits of self-dependence, and held to them with 
tenacity and simplicity as the natural way of living. 
He once bought a rifle, and learned to shoot with it in 
the Adirondack s, but did not shoot at any living thing. 
Indoors there was ancient simplicity, plain fare, which 
he seldom noticed, or if he did so, only for a word of 
thanksgiving ; not suffering further comment or any 
talk of it ; he did not drink wine habitually, but he 
offered it to guests, and on such occasions took one 
glass ; he smoked very moderately, but only after fifty, 
though he had learned to smoke at college. He was 
very kind to his servants and considerate of them. 
He rose at six and retired at ten, but he was able to 
keep later hours with visitors and suffered no incon- 
venience from it. In business he was not shrewd. 
" He had no business faculty," says his son, " or even 
ordinary skill in figures ; could only with the greatest 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 85 

difficulty be made to understand an account." He 
found it to his advantage finally to allow a commer- 
cial friend to attend even to his arrangements with 
his publishers, and in the management of his property 
he had relied previously on the counsel of another 
elder and lifelong friend, the staunchest, perhaps, of 
all at that time, his parishioner, Mr. Abel Adams. 

The mode of his dealing with books was one of his 
most characteristic and interesting traits. He was a 
reader, but not a student of books ; a writer, not a 
scholar. He held the opinion that a man who writes 
must abandon reading in the scholastic sense. His 
command of foreign languages was inconsiderable. 
He had that tincture of Latin and Greek that Har- 
vard in those days of ineffective classical instruction 
gave ; but he never read either language at home, 
though he seems to have tried occasionally a Latin 
author on a journey, — Martial or a treatise of Cicero. 
He read German, and accomplished the perusal of 
Goethe's entire works as a task and partly out of re- 
spect to Carlyle's judgment; but he used the language 
comparatively little and had no first-hand acquaint- 
ance with German philosophy. He also read French, 
Sainte-Beuve and George Sand, for example, but he did 
not care for the language or its literature. He was, 
in fact, for all practical purposes, an English reader 
and used translations in making acquaintance with 
his most revered authors, Plato and the Neo-Plato- 
nists, Plutarch, Montaigne, and others, whenever an 
English version was available. He read two kinds of 
books: biography, anecdotes, and certain kinds of 
travel and science, which satisfied his taste for the 
expression of character and manners, and also fur- 



86 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

nished him with particular illustrations of life, and, in 
the case of science, examples of law, which were useful 
in lectures ; and secondly, books of philosophy and old 
religion, generally mystical, which stimulated his mind 
and affected him as he says Alcott's conversation did, 
during which he listened to his own thoughts instead 
of his friend's ; he used them to tone his mind, as Gray 
read Spenser before composing. He was also preoc- 
cupied, in reading, with style or expression, had an 
eye to the good sentences and noted down numberless 
quotations which he kept in a book as a treasury for 
use. He was strictly independent in his preferences 
and estimates. " He could see nothing," says his 
confidential biographer, Mr. Cabot, " in Shelley, Aris- 
tophanes, Don Quixote, Miss Austen, Dickens ; " per- 
haps his characterization of Dante as " another Zerah 
Colburn" is the most lucid instance of his mental 
ineptitude ; but non-conductivity was a large element 
in his make-up, in general, and in these examples of 
limited sympathy and understanding the confined 
character of his culture is manifest. He was no more 
rich in critical faculty than in scientific intellect and 
the historical sense. He was, in fact, singularly in- 
dependent of books, and indifferent to knowledge as 
such, but valued them as one, though an inferior, 
source of the power to live. His maxim, "Expres- 
sion is what we want ; not knowledge, but vent," sum- 
marizes his point of view and implies his method. 
His reading was wide, but not deep, desultory but not 
catholic, strange but not learned, and reflected the 
idiosyncrasy of his character so perfectly that, hardly 
less than his writings, it is a mode of his self-portrayal 
and stamped with reality. One follows him into the 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 87 

books he read, not for the sources of his thought, but 
for the mould of the man himself. 

In the correlative part of a writer's life, composi- 
tion, the state of Emerson is as plain. He composed 
out-of-doors in the woods and pastures, where he loved 
to ramble, and since his early days of self-protective 
indolence at Cambridge in the life at Divinity Hall 
he had carefully preserved these country habits. 
" Wherever I go," he wrote on first settling at Con- 
cord, "I guard and study my rambling propensities 
with a care that is ridiculous to people, but to me is 
the care of my high calling." He was town-bred, and 
the love of the country came to him truly only in early 
manhood, but for this reason it had a freshness and 
wholeness and was self-conscious to a degree that gave 
it a value somewhat out of the ordinary. He rejoiced 
in Walden and the adjacent rough fields and meadows 
as in a forest paradise. His senses opened to it, — 
" the moist, warm, glittering, budding, and melodious 
hour," and he came to know the country in every 
mood of weather, landscape, and horizon, in its great 
lines and in its detail homely but dear, and abounding 
in changeful beauty, the harsh New England land. 
Anemone and chipmunk, titmouse and rhodora, black 
ice and starlight, he knew and loved them all, and 
was, almost more than Thoreau, a forest citizen. He 
was greatly pleased to have Indians and gypsies use 
his land. He liked to work, too, in his garden and 
orchard, to prune trees and think about pears and 
gather brushwood ; but he was inexpert with all tools, 
and made but an awkward farmer ; gradually his par- 
ticipation became less active, and there were friendly 
hands to relieve him of the care while preserving his 



88 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

enjoyment. He was less interested in animals, though 
he could catch a horse with an ear of corn ; and he 
never had any pets. The daily life of the garden and 
fields about the house was always a pleasure and re- 
source to him ; but it was the larger and wilder estate 
near Walden that was more peculiarly his " garden," 
where he found the thoughts that he brought home 
with him. 

His own attitude in this out-of-doors study is well 
described in his declaration, — "I would not degrade 
myself by casting about for a thought nor by waiting 
for one." Receptivity was the prime condition for 
this mode of thinking; volition would be an imper- 
tinence; the thoughts came, as lyrics are popularly 
supposed to come, and arrived in what form and on 
what topic might please themselves. It was inspira- 
tion put into practice ; the product was pensees, — 
thought-crystals, as it were, each formed spontaneously 
by its own unaided law. Emerson remembered them, 
turned them over in his mind until perhaps they came 
again in a more fit and beautiful form of expression, 
and he preserved them in his journals to write which 
was his daily task. When there was question of a 
lecture, he sifted out of these journals thoughts on the 
selected theme or cognate with it, and casting them 
into paragraphs made up a whole. Two forms of com- 
position were involved in the process: the sentence, 
which has been rightly termed the literary unit of his 
style; and the sermon, or frame of the discourse, loosely 
conceived as a series of headings, under each of which 
there might be an effusion of thought. Emerson's 
constructive art in prose was limited to this simple 
combination of the minister's old pulpit sermon and 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 89 

the man-of -letters' pens£e. The essay was an identical 
form with the lecture, but made up by a selection 
from old lectures as well as the journals, and repre- 
sented the originals in a thrice and four times sifted 
form, the best thought and the best expression; the 
last result and quintessence of his mind. The seed- 
field of all, however, was the wild land he wandered 
over ; and if Alcott thought that Emerson's essays 
were not properly published till he read them with 
his own voice, Emerson himself . would not have 
found the expression adequate till they were heard in 
the natural scenes which had generated them. His 
conviction of the union of his thought with nature 
sounds mystical ; but, like his practice of inspiration, 
it represents a very real fact in his psychology and in 
his act of thought; both denote a peculiarity in his 
mental process. For him, all thought carried its 
environment with it, as poetic thought carries its 
imagery, and was equally inseparable therefrom ; and 
he restricted the original action of his mind as purely 
as possible to its unconscious operation : these are the 
practical facts, though in Emerson's mind they had 
an aura of mysticism. He interpreted this process of 
spontaneous suggestion in the environment of the wild 
as a transmutation of nature herself, and believed 
that the resulting thought, so far as it was pure and 
unmixed with volition, was one, as he would say, with 
the harmonies of the stars and the secrets of the deep; 
he maintained, therefore, jealously his nearness and 
openness to nature and his waiting mood, and valued, 
far more than persons or books, this wild-wood cell 
where his soul found illumination. In the quality of 
the action, however, by which he thus fed his genius, 



90 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

he was not so different from other poets ; for mental 
processes are much the same, however explanations 
may vary. What was more peculiar to him was that 
he made a semi-religious rite of it, and limited him- 
self to the mood and shut himself up in it as the true 
path, with unconcern for other ways of reason, as if 
he had been the founder of a nature-sect in some Ti- 
betan world. It is useful to observe, too, that just as 
to his rejection of past learning there corresponded a 
mental indisposition for scholarship, so in his wait- 
ing on nature may be discerned the obverse of his per- 
sonal liking for aimless strolling and forest idleness 
often characteristic of the poetic temperament; for 
whatever Emerson was, he was constitutionally. 

This is seen also in his friendships. It is in this part 
of his life, perhaps, that it is most difficult to show 
the facts with justice. Emerson himself by his fre- 
quent lamentation over his social defects, which his 
son says he exaggerated, has made the way easy to rep- 
resent him as an unsocial person. He certainly seemed, 
even to his contemporaries, hedged about with something 
of saintship, not that he was thought to be at all a sacred 
person, but his presence diffused a certain grave respect, 
enforced distance, and imposed itself upon others ; he 
carried with him by the formality of his manner and 
his general inheritance the atmosphere of a Puritan 
minister of the old time. He was physically inacces- 
sible. "What man was he," says Dr. Holmes, "who 
would lay his hand familiarly upon his shoulder ? " 
No one seems ever to have spoken to him in a natural 
tone of voice except his brothers. He was never sur- 
prised in an act of intimacy; no biographer or writer 
of reminiscences records such a thing. He was, upon 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 91 

the other hand, anxious to communicate himself, and 
felt grievously his incapacity ; but he could not give 
himself, he could not even impart himself ; when he 
attempted it, he says, dumbness and palsy fell upon 
him. He disliked even to visit, because of his failure 
as a guest. As to friendship, he conceived of it as a 
holy state, like matrimony, a function of divine souls ; 
he derived this view from Plato, and in his writing on 
friendship he platonizes most : here is the point, per- 
haps, where he for once depended more on the book 
than on experience and allowed his thoughts to be 
dominated by a literary tradition. In practice, he ar- 
rived at the paradox that a friend is a treasure to be 
enjoyed preferably in absence. 

There were two obstacles that intervened between 
him and that free communication and enjoyment in 
human intercourse which in its affectionate forms 
becomes friendship. The first was the " cold obstruc- 
tion " of his own temperament. One extract from his 
journals, in 1839, sufficiently states his own view of 
the case, and it is typical of many other of his expres- 
sions from early youth to maturity of age : — 

" Some people are born public souls, and live with all 
their doors open to the street. Close beside them we find in 
contrast the lonely man, with all his doors shut, reticent, 
thoughtful, shrinking from crowds, afraid to take hold of 
hands ; thankful for the existence of the other, but incapa- 
ble of such performance, wondering at its possibility; full 
of thoughts, but paralyzed and silenced instantly by these 
boisterous masters ; and, though loving his race, discovering 
at last that he has no proper sympathy with persons, but 
only with their genius and aims. He is solitary because he 
has society in his thought, and, when people come in, they 
drive away his society and isolate him. We would all be 



92 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

public meu, if we could afford it ; I am wholly private ; such 
is the poverty of my constitution. Heaven ' betrayed me to 
a book, and wrapped me in a gown.' I have no social talent, 
no will, and a steady appetite for insights in any or all 
directions, to balance my manifold imbecilities. 

"... Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I 
see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to me. 
Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my speech with 
such. You might turn a yoke of oxen between every pair of 
words ; and the behavior is as awkward and proud. I see 
the ludicrousness of the plight as well as they. But never 
having found any remedy, I am very patient of this folly 
or shame ; patient of my churl's mask, in the belief that this 
privation has certain rich compensations." 

The second obstacle lay in one of Emerson's most 
interesting traits, belonging in the sphere of his 
idiosyncrasy. The gradual fading out of personality 
as an element in life is one of the most striking 
incidents in the history of his mind. The phenome- 
non itself characterizes the intellectual life in any 
high state of development, and is a part of the en- 
franchisement of the mind from the senses and the 
tyranny of all mortal conditions ; but in Emerson it 
is seen with strange lucidity and a shade of sadness. 
The sense of the personality of Christ was the first to 
go ; at a very early age whatever blessing streams from 
the person of Jesus was dried up in the young minister. 
The personality of God then passed in turn ; this was 
a necessity of thought ; philosophy required it. " The 
soul knows no persons." Finally, personality began to 
ebb from individuals, for the law held in the human 
as well as in the supernatural sphere. The death of 
his brothers, the death of his wife in the brief marriage 
days of early life, the death of his son, lowered the 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 93 

value of personality by showing its transitoriness. 
Why does one love his friends ? Is it not for their 
virtue and moral illumination, for their excellence of 
being ? This was Emerson's thought. He loved his 
friends, in the high sense, for what they contained of 
God, or excellence of being ; and naturally this was 
a value that diminished on acquaintance, such is hu- 
manity even in the best and happiest examples. 
Friendship seemed more and more a thing tangential 
with life, full of contingency, with benefits very 
sporadic ; each soul is a necessary solitude unto itself. 
This philosophical history underlay not only Emerson's 
doctrine of friendship, but his reflective attitude, as 
distinguished from practical service, to his friends ; 
for he was infinitely persistent in believing his own 
states of mind. 

Emerson, however, was a very kindly man, and his 
social inaptitude and mental view, though they played 
their part, did not destroy the pleasures of friendship 
of which he had as full a share as his temperament 
allowed, and it was a goodly portion. Of what may 
be termed honest friendship, kept wholesome by 
serviceableness in real things, Mr. Abel Adams was 
the best type. He was the only individual from 
whom Emerson accepted any financial aid. At one 
time Mr. Adams, who was his business adviser, had 
led him to make an unlucky investment in Vermont 
railroads ; and in the hard times of the Civil War, when 
Emerson's son was in college, remembering this inci- 
dent, he asked to be allowed to bear the collegiate 
expenses, and Emerson after some consideration con- 
sented. He had no sounder friend. In his own 
family another natural and simple friendship grew up 



94 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

with Miss Elizabeth Hoar, who, having been betrothed 
to his brother Charles and being treated as a daughter 
by his mother, became an intimate of the house ; in her 
society he found the grace of womanly friendship in 
ways without disturbance to his sensitiveness, and this 
was one of his domestic treasures, as if in the family 
circle. It is only on the entrance of literary persons 
that incompleteness in the relations begins to be felt. 
The first man of letters, or at least of the literary life, 
whom Emerson made his friend was Alcott. He over- 
flowed with admiration for him, and of all men best 
appreciated his nature and most forgave his ways. He 
confessed Alcott could not write nor make any useful 
public expression of himself ; he made him show to the 
English friends whom he was bringing over a letter in 
which was plainly set down the statement that the 
philosopher, whatever value he might have as a guide 
in theory, was not to be trusted in matters of fact, and 
in the socialistic experiment at Fruitlands Emerson 
found vexation, doubtless, as in Alcott' s practical affairs 
generally ; but he proclaimed the greatness of the man 
and his value for him unceasingly. He was loyal; he 
even asked him and his wife to share his house, but 
Mrs. Alcott sensibly declined ; yet he 1 does not make 
very plain what it was in Alcott that he prized pre- 
cisely except that through conversation with him Plato 
became a reality instead of remaining a beautiful 
dream. "When I go to talk with Alcott," he says, 
"it is not so much to get his thoughts as to watch 
myself under his influence. He excites me, and I 
think freely." He was generous and even enthusias- 
tic, as was his habit, in praise ; but perhaps what most 
fastened his attention was the sage's faculty for sub- 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 95 

limated talk, together with his entire unconcern for 
practicality. The story of their friendship shows 
Emerson in unfailingly humane action amid some- 
what trying circumstances, and this is a more im- 
portant trait than his intellectual admiration. On 
the other hand, Alcott noticed the " impersonal or 
discrete" quality of Emerson's manner, and thought 
it lessened his charm. Margaret Fuller was another 
person who awakened his admiration. She was a 
visitor at his house. She had energy of the heart as 
well as of the head, and she tried with much despera- 
tion, it would appear, to win into his intimacy. His 
responses to her, pleading the barriers of his nature 
and retiring into dumbness as his assigned state in 
this world, as well as his remarks about the chills 
with which her presence at times affected him when 
she unhappily sought to thaw him, sufficiently disclose 
the situation. " She ever seems to crave," he says, 
" something I have not, or have not for her ; " and 
again, " She freezes me to silence when we promise 
to come nearest." Ke was brought much into rela- 
tions with her through their joint interest in TJie Dial, 
and he was as serviceable to her as his opportunities 
allowed, as he was to every one ; and he joined in 
writing her memoir after her death. On her part, 
finding the impenetrability of the defence, she had 
long desisted from the attack. 

Emerson was very sensible of the response that the 
young made to him, and he was much more at ease 
in meeting them than in his general intercourse with 
the world. He had a welcome for them always, his 
quickest sympathies were awakened, and in youth 
itself he found unfailing charm. He opened to them 



96 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

more readily, and with some touch of the intimacy that 
only his own household knew, which however brief 
and ordinary and passing, some of them long remem- 
bered and bore witness to. The account which Mr. 
Albee gives of his visit there as a schoolboy, a stranger, 
is an admirable instance of Emerson's way with the 
young. It is not singular that the two friends who got 
on best and most humanly with him were young men 
when he made friends of them. Both Thoreau and El- 
lery Channing were fifteen years younger than Emerson 
and in their twenties when the friendship became firm 
and cordial. They were companions, one or the other 
of them but not together, of his walks, and both were 
enthusiasts for nature, with woodcraft and artist-lore, 
and contributed something to quicken and enrich his 
own enjoyment. They were both, too, sharers of his 
primitive tastes and useful in practical country ways. 
Channing once cut his wood for him, and Thoreau 
planted his pasture with young trees. There was 
some comradery in both these friendships, and Emerson 
came nearer to these two than to any others outside of 
his household in human ways. Here friendship had 
another than intellectual or literary ground ; it was 
more broadly based in a companionship of life nor- 
mally and happily engaged. Thoreau, indeed, became 
for two years, when he was twenty-four, an inmate of 
the house, and was a much prized member of the family 
in family ways, helpful to all. The recollections of 
the children show that he was much endeared to them, 
and until his death he was an unfailing resource in 
times when his help or care was wanted. The 
memoirs of the house are wholly honourable to him, 
and show him in the most humane light that falls any- 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 97 

where upon his life. It is true that there was a bond 
of intellectual likeness, almost identity, between him 
and Emerson ; but his individuality is in the bond, too, 
combative and unconformed, original and hardy, and 
by it whatever he had received from Emerson was 
stamped his own ; yet the friendship was not an 
intellectual one simply or primarily, but was a bond of 
life. It seems not unlikely that these two young men 
had a hand in stirring Emerson to join in the Anti- 
Slavery campaign, in which they both showed young 
blood ; they certainly sustained him in his woodcraft, 
which was a large part of his poetic energy ; and in 
their companionship he was most fortunate. It is no- 
ticeable that he did not overestimate their literary 
talent ; he had no illusions about the merit of even his 
greater contemporaries, and he was not to be deceived 
by the smaller ones ; just as he wrote to Carlyle that 
Margaret Fuller had neither beauty nor genius, he 
looked on Thoreau and Channing with eyes that rather 
diminished than exaggerated their talents. 

It was in the circle of social acquaintance that Emer- 
son's coldness was most embarrassing to himself and dis- 
concerting for others. Hawthorne was at one time his 
neighbour ; they met occasionally and once took a brief 
walking tour together, but neither of them had the 
genial power of human nature, and their contact was 
only friendly and external. Hawthorne, on his side, 
left the immortal picture : " It was good to meet him 
in the wood paths or sometimes in our avenue with 
that pure intellectual gleam diffusing about his pres- 
ence like the garment of a shining one." Emerson, 
on the other side, felt that here was a man greater than 
his works, which was a common judgment of his with 



98 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

regard to men ; he could not read his friend's books, 
and described them as "too young." With the Cam- 
bridge men his relations were never close, partly be- 
cause at Harvard he had been tabooed by the elder 
generation, and it was only with the younger men 
there that he came into friendly contact ; among 
them, as for example Lowell, there was warmth of 
admiration for Emerson and that love which is min- 
gled of respect and youthful gratitude ; but the threads 
of his life, though they crossed with those of his con- 
temporaries in literature, did so in a purely temporal 
way and without importance; he had no true touch 
with Longfellow or Holmes or Lowell any more than 
with Hawthorne or Whittier, nor did he value their 
literary performance highly in any case. He lived in 
a quite different world from them. In his own study 
he was most disappointing to those who came to sit at 
the feet of Gamaliel, of whom there were many, for he 
steadily refused to be an oracle or guide of life, and 
he was discreet and often non-committal in replying 
to direct questions on high topics. The experience of 
Henry James, senior, is an example, the more striking 
because expressed with some vexation. He attacked 
Emerson intellectually with much the same youthful 
vehemence, it would seem, as Margaret Fuller had 
used emotionally, and met the same disaster of com- 
plete overthrow. " It turned out, " he says, " that any 
average old dame in a horse-car would have satisfied 
my intellectual capacity just as well as Emerson." 
The antithesis between the personal fascination of 
Emerson, whether speaking or silent, as a figure, and 
his intellectual torpor in conversation, seemed very 
marvellous to Mr. James. There were others who had 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 99 

similarly unhappy fortune in the encounter. The 
more sensible pilgrims were disconcerted and non- 
plussed at finding how little there was to receive ; 
the more lunatic were annoyed or outraged by the in- 
explicable dryness ; yet all went away conscious of his 
" vague nobleness and thorough sweetness " to use 
Miss Martineau's words, and perhaps feeling content 
with him as a man out of their sphere, but strangely 
puzzled by finding how completely they had failed of 
any approach, sympathy, response, contact, or under- 
standing. This is an extreme statement; but it 
must have been true of numbers of the train of pil- 
grims that sought his doors. To himself the variety 
of their devils seemed legion, and in his own thoughts 
he was impatient of being confessor to folly and 
craziness. But he had such a respect for the individ- 
ual soul, and was so tender of its rights and private 
intuitions, that he had formed a habit of hospitality 
of mind and welcome to the most unpromising. It is 
said that at times even his equanimity gave way and 
that on rare occasions he gave vent to his indigna- 
tion and disapproval in plain words. As time 
went on and the transcendentalists and other reformers 
became figures of the past, the pilgrims were more 
amenable ; but in thinking of the " coldness " of 
Emerson, his self-guard, incommunicability, and im- 
penetrability, it should be remembered in what a school 
he was tried. The ideal which he ascribed to " Osman " 
was his own : " Let it be set down to the praise of 
Osman that he had a humanity so broad and deep that, 
though his nature was so subtly fine as to disgust all 
men with his refinements and spider-spinnings, yet 
there was never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane 






100 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

man, some fool with a beard, or a mutilation, or pet 
madness in his brain, but fled at once to him — that 
great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the 
centre of the country. And the madness which he 
harbored he did not share." 

The reserve of Emerson is to be looked at in the 
light of this ideal, which he realized in his human re- 
lations with the truly poor, with the maimed, the de- 
spised and rejected, the feeble, and the unhappy ; no 
man did his duty better by them in this world. His 
habitual demeanour, the tranquillity, the placidity, the 
unmoved calm of his spirit, was the most medicinal of 
traits in such an office ; though founded on his natural 
reserve and sustained by his aristocratic force in which 
there were large elements of fastidiousness, of silent 
repulsions, and even a marked strain of haughtiness, 
yet it must also be thought that education bore a part 
in building up that absolute self-possession and com- 
mand, that self -containment, which was as much a 
thing of choice as of necessity and was the strength of 
his character ; a thousand influences playing upon him 
daily for years taught him to refrain. 

There was, of course, as years went by and his fame 
spread, an increasing stream of those who put in an 
appearance by letters only, with gratitude or for 
counsel. To these appeals Emerson was courteously 
attentive, and in several cases he is known to have taken 
great pains for these distant and strange correspondents 
and to have maintained a long interest in them. In gen- 
eral, he was not a good letter- writer, not interesting and 
fluent ; his letters to Carlyle, by which his correspon- 
dence is best known, are composed rather than written ; 
like most of his important letters, they were drafted 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 101 

and copied. In connection with this rather singular 
circumstance, however, it should be recalled that 
Emerson was Dot accustomed to straightaway writing ; 
he never composed with a running pen; the lecture or 
essay was a mosaic and composite product, a recombi- 
nation and not a first creation ; it was in his political 
addresses that he is most forthright in style. The 
letters to Carlyle are the memorial of the most illus- 
trious of his distant friendships, and indeed the only 
such friendship of importance. It was a very perfect 
type of Emerson's mode of friendship on both the 
practical and reflective side, and in the published record 
of it the two phases are amply illustrated. He was inex- 
haustible in actual service and gave an attention to the 
interests of Carlyle in America, both in publication 
and income, that involved much patient trouble and 
even sacrifice for himself, and he was also always ready 
with praise and courage for his friend, with pride in 
him, and with affectionate solicitude in the things 
of private life. The two men so profoundly con- 
trasted were deeply attached each in his own way. As 
time went on, it was plainly Emerson who came to 
care less for the expression of friendship, and found 
that it sufficed him as a silent treasure : he seems less 
warm in contrast with his friend, and to abate some- 
what, whereas in the beginning it had been the other 
way ; and age coming upon both, the letters naturally 
ceased. The portrait of Carlyle, however, hanging in 
the study, was perhaps its most prized treasure, and to 
the end of Emerson's days that face was always, in his 
last words full of proud affection as his mind was 
fading, " my man." 

The varied course of these years at home was 



102 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

broken by Emerson's second visit to England and 
France. He bad been invited to lecture in England 
and after mucb hesitation be decided to go. He 
sailed on October 5, 1847, and landed at Liverpool. 
Mr. Alexander Ireland was bis principal adviser and 
helper, and under bis guidance be lectured in many 
provincial towns and also in London and Edinburgh. 
He was well received, drew public attention and inter- 
ested audiences, and succeeded in tbe same way as in 
America, but to a greater degree. There was in his 
hearers the mental astonishment and vague under- 
standing that he awoke in his own country, but 
shining through this were the authority of the spirit- 
ual meaning, the person of Emerson with. its visionary 
fascination, and the charm of the sentences, each appar- 
ently so lucid in itself but dazzling the understanding 
in the mystery of their combination. He spoke natu- 
rally, without any attempt at effect, just as he stood 
before the audience in his native angularity and thin- 
ness, and the truths he read in his clear and nasal 
voice, without intonation or other elocution than enun- 
ciation, made the oration. The audiences were at first 
startled, then pleased, and even became enthusiastic 
at times, in his reception. He made an excellent 
impression by his sincerity and elevation, and perhaps 
by his boldness as well as by the literary strength of 
his discourse, and he increased his reputation in Eng- 
land where he had long had readers. He was also 
much taken out of himself and his solitary ways. He 
stayed much in private houses and was probably never 
so mixed with human society in his life. He was re- 
ceived with endless kindness everywhere. In London 
Carlyle welcomed him, and with his aid and that of 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 103 

Bancroft and others he saw much, of England and the 
English, in the literary and aristocratic portions of 
society as well as in the middle class. He enjoyed the 
attention shown him, especially as a means of meeting 
men, which was always his principal desire in travel. 
His mind was more alert and open than during his 
former stay abroad, and was thoroughly hospitable. 
He was, in general, greatly pleased with the English 
as a nation of strong practicality and infinite resource 
in material civilization; he made the usual limitations 
to which his mind was accustomed, which had their 
ground in his own spirituality and the democratic 
training of his birth and life; his eyes were not 
abashed or confused or disturbed by any object of great- 
ness, the things of trade or rank, or fame or brilliance 
in reputation, but he was quick to recognize their 
worth, though his scale was his own ; he imposed his 
judgment, and it was naturally the old judgment, as 
for example that there was "no religion" in England, 
and that men were less than they should be, and that, 
whatever might be his admiration, he had little sympa- 
thy or attachment. Carlyle and Emerson met infre- 
quently, and hot always, it is said, with pleasure; the 
violence of the one and the ethereality of the other 
were incongruous ; but they were old friends, who, 
secure of each other's real respect and affection, 
agreed to differ, and they made a journey together 
toward the end. The gentle ways of Leigh Hunt and 
the refinement of De Quincey pleased Emerson ; but 
the men of letters in general, like the other men of 
mind, interested him but did not further attract him. 
At Oxford he made another young friend, Arthur 
Clough, who afterward followed him to Concord ; in 



104 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

Paris, whither he went for three weeks, the two dined 
together often, and Clough was to him not unlike the 
young men he had left at home, of whom Thoreau 
was then taking care of his household. These months 
when he was abroad were times of Chartism in England 
and Revolution in Paris, and he was thus brought near 
to the social phases of the system in those countries, 
and this fact affected the character of his remarks upon 
them. It was, altogether, the most rich experience of 
society, and the only important one, that he ever had. 
It must have been much, too, even for such an indi- 
vidualist as himself, to be so assured of his place in the 
world by public recognition. In his travelling, how- 
ever, the old self continually reasserted its instincts 
and habits ; he felt lost in the confusion and strain of 
lectures; he missed his family, and longed for home, 
and was glad when he arrived there toward the end 
of July, 1848, after so fruitful and happy an ex- 
cursion. 

The Civil War, when it broke out in April, 1861, 
found Emerson in the midst of a course of lectures in 
Boston, and on the next occasion after the fall of Fort 
Sumter he introduced a lecture in which he congratu- 
lated the people upon the consolidation of the nation 
in the cause and eloquently described the fervour of 
the moment. The war, as it went on, brought to him 
its privations as to others, lectures becoming practically 
impossible and books not being salable ; the activity 
of his practical life was broken ; but upon every proper 
occasion he took part in the discussion of the topic of 
the day. In the earlier years he spoke often on Sun- 
days before the free congregation of Theodore Parker, 
who had died. With regard to public affairs, he lee- 



in.] "THE HYPOCRITIC DAYS" 105 

tured in Washington on Emancipation in February, 
1862, and saw Lincoln and talked with him on the 
subject of slavery. He spoke at the meeting in Bos- 
ton on the issuing of the Proclamation of Emancipa- 
tion in September of that year, and at the celebration 
of the day when it went into effect, January 1, 1863, 
he read his Boston Hymn. He also spoke at Concord 
on the occasion of Lincoln's death, and took part in 
the welcome home of the Harvard soldiers on Com- 
mencement Bay, 1865. Throughout' the war he was 
deeply moved in his patriotic feelings and rejoiced in 
it not only as a cause of civilization, but for its rein- 
vigoration of the spirit of the people. The effect of 
it upon his own thought was remarkable ; the anti- 
social and anarchistic sentiments which were to be 
plentifully found in his writings before this time 
cease ; and in their place there is a powerful grasp 
of the social unities embodied in the state as a main 
source of the blessings of civilization. It is, however, 
rather in his poetry that the sentiment of the war left 
its mark. 

Throughout all this period from 1836 to 1865, which 
was the active portion of his life and included the 
maturity of his genius, he published books, though at 
infrequent intervals. Succeeding the volume entitled 
Nature, the Phi Beta Kappa and Divinity School 
Addresses had been separately issued. The first se- 
ries of Essays appeared in 1841, both here and in 
England ; the second series in 1844, also reprinted 
there. The first collection of Poems was published 
in 1847. There followed in turn Miscellanies, 1849, 
Representative Men, 1850, English Traits, 1856, 
The Conduct of Life, 1860. The last was the first 



106 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap, hi 

book to have a ready sale, twenty-five hundred copies 
being disposed of in a few days, and marked the 
establishment of his popular vogue as an author. 
Up to this time his reputation as a writer had been 
perhaps equal in England to what it was in his own 
country, owing to the influential introduction given 
to him in that country by Carlyle and to the state of 
liberal opinion there and to its organization ; and his 
Essays were somewhat known in France, where Qui- 
net especially had directed attention to him. Outside 
of books he had published at first in the North Amer- 
ican Review a few articles ; The Dial, and, much later, 
Tlie Atlantic Monthly, received many contributions 
from him, and ther.e had been some other sporadic 
appearance of his ^papers and poems. He had also 
joined in the Mertibirs of Margaret Fuller, and had 
edited Thoreau's remains. Though he published later 
volumes collected from his lectures, the original work 
of his life was already completed by this date, and be- 
longs to the literary period before the war. It is most 
convenient to view it as a whole. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ESSAYS 

The better mode of approaching Emerson's ideas is 
to examine them, after his own method, as they arose 
in his mind, not systematically, but as groups of re- 
lated ideas about a few centres of thought. It is 
proper to mention as preliminaries to his thinking the 
predisposition of his mind to a religious interpretation 
of life and his preoccupation with morals. These 
were survivals in him of old religion and of his pro- 
fessional habit and training, and sprang from a mix- 
ture of heredity and education. He was by type a 
New England minister, and he never lost the mould 
either in personal appearance or in mental behaviour ; 
all his ideas wear the black coat. He addressed 
men from a .platform of superiority and spoke with 
authority ; as a lecturer no less than as a preacher 
in the Old North Church he was an " ambassador of 
the Highest," and felt his profession. However he 
may deprecate and disclaim, and say with Socrates 
that he does not teach, but if any benefit by him the 
god teaches them, he can no more lay aside the 
assured and aggressive attitude of a believer in that 
which alone is true and which he so declares, than he 
could lay off the formality of his manners. It is to 
as little use that he would sometimes take on the 
countenance of Montaigne and seem a simple in- 

107 



T 



108 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

quirer, a man of many moods and committed to none 
of them; there was not a fibre of scepticism in his 
whole constitution. Montaigne held the ways of the 
world and Emerson the ways of the spirit, and each 
dealt freely with his own ; but in all his doings Em- 
erson was dominated above his will by a faith so pure, 
so absolute, so unquestioning that he could hardly 
divide it from his consciousness of being. He was, 
too, a man of one idea, the moral sentiment, though 
the singleness of the idea was compatible in its appli- 
cation to life with infinite diversity in its phases ; 
wherever his theme may begin, it becomes religious, 
he exhorts, and all ends at last in the primacy of 
morals. The Essays are the best of lay-sermons ; but 
their laicism is only the king's incognito. He was so 
much a man of religion that he undervalued literature, 
science, and art, and their chief examples, because 
they viewed life from a different point, just as on his 
first visit to England he thought Landor and Carlyle, 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, failed of the full measure 
of men because they were not overwhelmingly filled 
with the moral sentiment and its importance. In 
both cases the view taken is professional. Literature 
enters into the Essays as salt and savour ; but their 
end is not literary. Emerson in the substance of his 
work belongs with the divine writers, the religious 
spiritualists, the sacred moralists, the mystic philoso- 
phers, in whose hands all things turn to religion, to 
whom all life is religion, and nothing moves in the 
world except to divine meanings. 

Although Emerson was not careful to coordinate 
the several parts of his thought, they are not with- 
out organic relations; and from the beginning, not- 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 109 

withstanding his profession of unconcern for system, 
he had in mind a vague intention of attempting a 
statement of his philosophical views with some de- 
gree of wholeness. The First Philosophy was his 
name for the theory in its entirety, and he made some 
trials at writing it down almost at the start; and 
later he gathered some parts of the doctrine under 
the title, The Natural History of Intellect; but he 
never completed either of these schemes. Since the 
days of Socrates ignorance is as • good a starting- 
point as any for a philosopher ; and Emerson has one 
profession of ignorance which is fundamental. "No 
power of genius,' 7 he writes, "has ever yet had the 
smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect 
enigma remains." It is therefore not explicitly a 
philosophy of the absolute that is offered, though the 
absolute enters into it as an element. Inside the 
sphere of ignorance lies existence as it is known to 
man, and Emerson's thought always works within the 
limits of human experience. The primary intuition 
in his philosophy and initial point of all its develop- 
ment may be stated in the formula, — I am, therefore 
God is. The soul knows itself as an effect of which 
the cause is God ; and cause and effect being consub- 
stantial, and the one, as it were, but the obverse of 
the other, God and the soul have an identical being. 
Emerson conceives existence as energy ; uncircum- 
scribed and formless it is God, conditioned and in the 
finite it is the soul within and Nature without. It is 
in all three one divine energy. The soul may be best 
defined as a particular form of divine energy. Em- 
erson describes it in terms as " a particle of God," and 
says that it "becomes God." The identity of God 



110 EALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

and the soul in essential being is a fundamental tenet; 
and if it be his " least-breathed-on thought," it is the 
most precious of all and the centre of faith. The 
soul's knowledge of God, however, is not self-know- 
ledge, but is rather unfolded to human apprehension 
separately and diversely as knowledge of that energy, 
not ourselves, which has self -existence for its chief 
trait and is operant in and upon the soul, but above 
it. This self-existent energy, on the divine side, is 
known under the phase of causation, of which the 
soul is the effect, the phase of the eternal verities, 
Truth, Beauty, and Virtue clothed with majesty and 
instant authority over the soul, and the phase of law 
operating in manifold ways but with perfect sway in 
all being. In these several ways the soul stands in 
defined connection with God, and is thought of, not 
under the aspect of identity with, but as subject to 
operation from, an energy superior to itself. The 
mode of operation is termed an influx of deity into 
the soul. This influx is variable and takes place at 
moments definitely characterized. First, the moments 
are memorable, landmarks of the soul, and have a far- 
reaching and profound influence in the intervals of 
lower life. Secondly, the soul during them is con- 
scious of an unusual and immense fulness of life, feels 
the exercise of its high nature and equal to all being ; 
its private contritions are abolished, and all that was 
temporal, carnal, and accidental is burned away in the 
flame of the experience; it is clothed only incor- 
ruptibly; it is armed with all power as if issuing 
from omnipotence ; it truly lives. Thirdly, the soul 
is touched with a certain mania, under the experience, 
an enthusiasm, a ravishment, and this is most marked 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 111 

in the supreme cases as known to us by report, such 
as the trances of Socrates, the union of Plotinus, the 
conversion of Paul, and similar experiences of Plo- 
tinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Fox, and Swedenborg. 
The influx of deity is also variable in amount, and 
exists in degrees of more or less ; but its characteristic 
marks are these, memorableness, excess of the sense of 
life, mania. 

The function of the soul with regard to this divine 
influx is to receive, to be passive, to give unimpeded 
way to the currents which stream though it ; any use 
of volition or choice is an interference and obstruction ; 
absolute receptivity is the state of excellence ; for this 
inflowing is the presence of God, is the divine energy 
active, is the dynamic of the soul. There are all de- 
grees of it, in power. Those who receive the most are 
the greatest men ; those who receive and also impart 
the most are men of genius ; those who obstruct and 
fail of reception are the wicked, for evil is simply the 
privation of this presence and power. It comes to all 
men, in its degree, and constitutes their true life. 
The relation of men to God, so conceived as the " fast- 
flowing vigour " or stream of eternal being, is set 
forth under many images. The soul is always open 
to God on one side, as earth is open to the infinite of 
stars. The soul is like a man behind whose head an 
unseen spirit stands and puts forth its power through 
him. The soul is borne on divine being as on a stream 
that enfolds it and animates it and pours it forward 
through all experience. The soul is embosomed in it 
as earth in the ether. It is the Over-Soul which thus 
envelops, penetrates, and works. It is adult in the 
infant ; it is all in every man ; it is that in which 



112 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

men have their common nature ; it is the source of all 
wisdom and virtue, power and beauty, genius and love. 
It loves silence and exaltation ; it reveals and thrills ; 
it descends into men with entire possession. The soul 
is, indeed, one with this power, and divine ; but the 
Over-Soul is the boundless surplus of the soul's own 
nature ; it is the infinite of the soul which is made the 
element of the soul's being in the finite, where it is not 
disunited from it but more interlaced. It is not, how- 
ever, by metaphysical phrase that one best enters into 
the meaning of Emerson, but by his devotional spirit. 
What is essential to be understood in these passages is 
the sense of the divine nature and origin of the soul, 
the divine providence that attends it, the state of di- 
vine trust proper to it, the divine exaltation of its 
high moments increasing in their ascensions, the 
divine power of genius and love, the divine appease- 
ments of truth and beauty, the divine consummation 
of virtue ; and gathering this manifold and infinite 
divine into one, the Over-Soul, Emerson did but add 
a new name to the world-names of God. 

If Emerson's metaphysical reminiscences darken 
counsel in his doctrine of the deity, other obstructive 
fragments of old philosophy are found embedded in his 
doctrine of the human soul. The soul is identical in 
all men. Its essence is divine ; its human constitution 
arises through that differentiation which is the process 
of becoming in life. The soul, on the human side, is a 
bundle of faculties, each of which predicts its element 
as the fin of the fish predicts water ; it is also a locus 
or place of images, ideas, and concepts of law, which 
prophesy their correlatives in the universe. The 
faculties exist before their operation; the images, 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 113 

ideas, and concepts also exist before their development 
in consciousness, on the dark film of the soul. The idea 
of latency controls the entire theory. The soul is an un- 
developed potentiality in which lies folded the whole. 
In its essence it is a microcosm of God, for all of God 
is in its divine substance; in its phenomena it is a mi- 
crocosm of the world, " the compend of time and the 
correlative of Nature," or in other words all the facts 
of history preexist in the mind and all of Nature is 
already charactered in the brain. It is but to vary 
the phrase to say that all of humanity exists in every 
man ; for each soul is not only the equal of every other 
by virtue of an identical nature, but each soul also 
contains potentially the entire universe of experience. 
Life is the unfolding of the universe in it. The state 
of the soul in life is a flux of experience on a ground 
of unchangeable reality ; on the one side is the infinite 
diversity, complexity, differentiation, particularization, 
specializing of life in its extension, on the other side 
intensively is the centrality of the soul's indivisible 
self. The significance of these various ideas becomes 
plainer by their application in detail to the process of 
life. It suffices to recognize here the general notions 
of identity and equality in the souls of all men, of 
latency of power and of experience in the soul, of the 
microcosm in several phases, of the flux, and of 
the wholeness of the soul in itself. 

The means by which the latency of the soul is un- 
folded is Nature; and here again the miscellaneous 
eclecticism of Emerson's thought brings heterogeneous 
elements into the general scheme, and especially 
Swede uborgian ideas. The relation of the soul to 
Nature is parallel to its relation to God, in that there 



1U RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

is identity between the two and also operation of one 
upon the other, but the operation is differently con- 
ceived. It is set forth sometimes as an inflowing of 
Nature from without upon the soul, sometimes as an 
outflowing of the soul from within, which is then 
said to create Nature. To the one corresponds the 
metaphysical conception of Nature as the direct reali- 
zation of God in the unconscious, the divine energy 
known to the soul and acting upon it mediately, or 
God as it were at one remove ; to the other corresponds 
the metaphysical conception of Nature as put forth 
through the soul and existing only in the soul's per- 
ception or active energy. The simplest procedure, for 
the exposition of Emerson's thought, is to begin with 
the former view, under which Nature has an apparently 
independent being. The constitution of Nature so con- 
ceived is parallel to the constitution of the soul. The 
doctrine of the microcosm is the first to emerge. All 
of Nature exists in every part thereof, and the universe 
is thus represented in every one of its particles with 
all its powers ; or, by a variant statement, every part 
is infinitely related to every other part and by virtue 
of these relations contains the whole. There is thus 
the same identity and equality between the parts of 
Nature as between human souls, and each is a micro- 
cosm of the universe. The idea of latency reappears 
in the doctrine of the ascension of forms, that is, the 
theory that the evolution of Nature proceeds by a pro- 
gressive metamorphosis of lower into higher forms 
which are already contained and predicted in the em- 
bryo. The function of Nature is to unfold the soul. 
It does this by virtue of the perfect correspondence of 
Nature to the soul. At the contact of the two the 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 115 

functions of the soul unlock and play each in its appro- 
priate sphere, and also the images, ideas, and concepts 
preexisting in the soul arise into consciousness and 
become knowledge. The mental series exactly tallies 
with the material series. The correspondence of the 
material universe with the soul is not, however, limited 
to a mere identity in the series. Facts are symbols of 
ideas and laws, wherefore Nature is a vast emblem of 
truth; this symbolical interpretation of Nature is the 
larger part of its signification to men, and by it Nature 
herself, as it were, ascends into mind and exists in a 
higher sphere than materiality, that is, in the sphere 
of truth. If anything is dark in Nature, so that the 
correspondence seems to halt, it is because the faculty 
which acts in that particular element yet sleeps in 
man ; for the presence of the soul with Nature is not 
enough ; it must be an efficient presence, and this effi- 
ciency is the work of the Over-Soul which has in charge 
the gradual unfolding of the soul. The becoming of 
the soul is this process of the energizing of its latent 
power and knowledge by the agency of Nature accord- 
ing to the will of the Over-Soul. The soul is not left 
to its own volition and choice, nor to the casualty of 
Nature, but is in the hands of Providence. The Over- 
Soul thus forever screens it from premature ideas, and 
withdraws the veils only as the soul is prepared for 
new experience. When by contact with Nature every 
function of the soul is perfected in action, when the 
latent consciousness is entirely drawn out and exposed 
as knowledge, then will Nature be completely compre- 
hended, and the correspondence will appear, as it is, 
perfect; the mind and the mind's image will be one, 
and will include all. 



116 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

Emerson brings forward quite as prominently the 
other point of view under which the soul is said to 
create Nature. He observes that "the intellectual 
men do not believe in any essential dependence of 
the material world on thought and volition." He, 
however, does not himself elaborate this view, and is 
apt to retire to the ground of common sense, as if the 
air were difficult. He emphasizes the view rather in 
dealing with modifications' and rearrangements of Na- 
ture, as, for example, in invention, the practical arts, 
and the changes effected by history ; ships and cities, 
a military civilization or trade, are thus results of mind 
and volition. The poet or the artisan, likewise, creates 
the world he knows by virtue of his selection of the ele- 
ments to which he attends and of which he builds his 
consciousness with the stamp of individual choice; 
this differencing of Nature in our apprehension of it 
is thus a result of mind. Emerson does not realize 
the theory much beyond this point, though he adopts 
and repeats its easy formulas. That thought is prior 
to fact is a maxim with him ; but as he approaches 
the point where the elements of Nature are products 
of mind by perception, and so far may be said to be 
created in the act of knowing, he limits himself to thin 
statements of the commonplaces of philosophical ideal- 
ism, which principle did not have so varied an appli- 
cation in his handling as his other fragmentary meta- 
physical knowledge. The phenomenal aspect of Nature 
did not really interest him philosophically ; the power 
of religious faith was not here brought into play to 
stimulate and fortify him. It was only the moral uses 
of Nature that could hold his attention, and such parts 
of philosophy as he could relate to these or to religion. 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 117 

What is essential to observe is not the character of his 
philosophical idealism or the degree of it, metaphysi- 
cally, but his attachment to it as something that gave 
room to his sense that the higher meaning even of 
material things is spiritual, that all men's works in 
however gross a sphere of the practical are neverthe- 
less operations of the soul, that the soul is omnipres- 
ent and omnipotent even in matter. 

These are the centres of thought in Emerson's 
philosophy. Even so summary and brief an exposi- 
tion of them suffices, for on the intellectual side his 
philosophy is little more than outline. In themselves 
these ideas have small importance, relatively to what 
is deduced from them. They are for the most part 
fragments of old thought that have been long in the 
world, like boulders left by the primeval streams of 
man's intellect. They have not to Emerson himself 
the positive value of ascertained truth which makes 
up the body of men's knowledge; as metaphysics, 
psychology, science, in the real sense, they are but 
shreds and patches. Emerson had a certain scorn for 
truly scientific knowledge akin to his contempt for 
the process of reasoning, of argument and logic. 
Science, in his conception of things, lives in an essen- 
tially low plane of knowledge and becomes valuable 
only when spiritualized, interpreted in its symbolic 
senses, raised into the sphere of religion and morals. 
Gravitation as such is a gross fact, but as the symbol 
of something identical with it in a higher mode of 
being in the soul it is a spiritual law. Ideas of 
physics and the like are, therefore, to him mere raw 
material, in their state as scientific knowledge, and 
find their value in an ulterior use as interpreters of 



118 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

religion or exponents of ethics; they appeal to the 
religious nature and there deliver their message. 
All these centres of thought or ideas that have been 
described, while they truly give a divine background 
for the religious sense, find their practical use in the 
moral support of life rather than in the realm of in- 
tellectual truth. They are pegs to hang morals on. 
That is the more general use he makes of them ; for 
he refrained from much development of the mystical 
side of the theory as being rather for the private and 
unspoken experience of every man. Hence, far more 
important than the ideas by means of which he did his 
thinking are the primary counsels enunciated by him, v 
which have a vast sweep in the realm of conduct, and 
which he attached to these ideas, thus finding an intel- 
lectual support for his ethical theory. It is in de- 
veloping these counsels that he makes use of the ideas, 
and he introduces the ideas essentially as subsidiaries 
of the moral theme; they are the foundations and 
supports of the structure ; but his mind does not rest 
in them intellectually, however it may have done so 
devotionally ; it passes into the moral sense and there 
only displays its characteristic force. 

The first of these primary counsels may be termed 
the doctrine of acquiescence. In its simplest form it 
embodies the command to submit the soul passively to y 
the influx of divine energy from God ; but in the ex- 
position it receives a vast extension and is made to 
cover well-nigh the whole of life. The Over-Soul is 
not only a vigour that streams incessantly into the 
human soul, with higher and lower tides ; it also 
discharges another office which is best indicated by 
its other name, the Over- Will. It is providence ; and 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 119 

under this aspect such, is its scope that the human 
will becomes insignificant and impertinent. "What 
am I ? What has my will done to make me that I 
am ? Nothing," saj^s Emerson. " I have been floated 
into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, 
by secret currents of might and mind, and my in- 
genuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not 
aided, to an appreciable degree." This providence 
acts most obviously and on the lowest plane by limi- 
tation fixed in environment and structure, in organi- 
zation that tyrannizes over character, in the forms 
of the spine, the bill of the bird, the skull of the 
snake, in race, climate, sex, temperament, in the laws 
of specialization of functions, in the use that Nature 
makes of means. Here, in the grosser part of the 
field, Emerson presents limitation as an aspect of 
Nature herself, and calls it Circumstance or Fate. 
In the other parts he refers the operation to the Over- 
Will. It is seen in the occurrence of events on the 
large scale, which are above man's will and thrust 
upon him; even when he has an apparent share in 
them, as in history, his cooperation is slight. There 
is less intention in history than we ascribe to it, and 
the greatest captains build altars to Fortune. It is 
seen again in the internal constitution of our facul- 
ties. The images in the mind have a rank that we did 
not give them, an order independent of our volition. 
Thinking itself precedes the age of reflection, and 
goes on of itself in the infant and child and lays 
the foundations of conscious intellect. When we dis- 
cern justice or truth, we do nothing of ourselves but 
allow a passage to the beam. In the realm of char- 
acter it is the Over-Soul which publishes our true 









120 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

selves to the world, above our consciousness and our 
will. In works of genius and art it is that which the 
poet knows not of, and the artist embodies without 
being aware of it, which is the better part. 

The Over-Soul throws about man these veils of the 
unconscious and removes them at will. "God de- 
lights," says Emerson, "to isolate us every day and 
hide from us the past and the future. ' You will not 
remember/ he seems to say, 'and you will not ex- 
pect.' " There is much contingency, we thrive by 
casualties, and our chief experiences have been casual. 
The results of life are uncalculated and incalculable. 
The individual is always mistaken. It is ill to in- 
dulge much in design. All comes by the grace of 
God, — writing, doing, having ; and with his " heart set 
on honesty," he concludes, " I can see nothing at last 
in success or failure than more or less of vital force 
supplied from the Eternal/' The great error is to 
interfere. Prayer, in the ordinary use, is a disease of 
the will. Prayer that craves a private good, a par- 
ticular commodity, " is vicious " ; it is " meanness and 
theft." Any interference of the will with our moral 
nature vitiates it. There is no merit in striving 
with temptation. The interference of the intellect is 
equally superfluous and leads to mistake. Creeds are 
a disease of the intellect. Thus through the whole 
field of experience, in fate and history and character 
and genius, in our faculties and their conduct, and in 
the fortune of life, so large is the element of the 
Over- Will and the unconscious that man's part shrinks 
to the inappreciable. And Emerson concludes in a 
strain often repeated, of which one example will 
suffice, and that much abridged: — 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 121 

" We need only obey. Why need you choose so painfully 
your place, and occupation, and associates, and modes of 
action and of entertainment? Place yourself in the middle 
of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom 
it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to 
right, and a perfect contentment. If we will not be mar- 
plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, 
letters, arts, science, religion of men, would go on far better 
than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of 
the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, 
would organize itself as do now the rose and the air and 
the sun. I say, do not choose." 

Choice is a partial act. Obey, and let your constitu- 
tion choose, for that is where the divine currents flow, 
making you to be what you are, determining the soul 
as a whole toward its goal. In the constitution of the 
soul .acquiescence and choice are one, the blending of 
man's will with the will of God, the rise of spontaneity 
in the place of human volition. 

So the doctrine changes colour under our hands, and 
by a kind of metamorphosis out of the soul's acquies- 
cence springs what is the greatest of all the virtues in 
Emerson's scale, self-reliance, whose mode of action is 
by spontaneity ; and, indeed, to a reflective mind there 
is a hard logic which requires that what is Intuition 
in knowledge must be Impulse in action. Intuition 
and Impulse are twins ; they are the Janus faces of 
one image. Spontaneity is thus a new chord on which 
Emerson repeats the familiar strain, and remoulds 
the same ideas that were employed in developing the 
counsel of acquiescence. He uses the naine, self-re- 
liance, specifically to insulate the soul, and draws out 
more particularly the negative powers of the virtue to 
protect the soul against external influences. It is 






122 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

from this post of vantage that he attacks tradition, 
authority, and institutions. He rouses all the native 
egotism of the individual. All souls are equal one 
with another ; and this declaration is not a glittering 
generality, but is most literally taken. It is most 
strikingly exhibited in his attitude toward great men. 
What Plato has thought, any soul can think. The 
slip of a boy in a corner reading Shakespeare, knows 
that the English king was himself in another form, 
and has his pleasure in feeling this identity. Any 
man is as pertinent as Homer or Epaminondas. One 
should not overestimate the possibilities of Paul and 
Pericles or underestimate his own, since all are of 
the same stock. The relation of men virtually is not 
with other men but with God, who is the source of all 
truth and power. The soul radiates from God directly ; 
and hence there is no progress as a line of descent 
from great men, and the race does not so advance, but 
character and genius in later times do not excel the 
types of the antique world ; and hence, too, it is that 
all great men are seen to be unique, such that none 
could have had a man for his teacher, but rather is he 
protected from the over-influence of others and grows 
up in the shade and obscurity. Each man has some 
peculiarity in his constitution which makes him a new 
creature with a value of his own, and this is sacrificed 
and nullified by deference to the ways and thoughts 
of others. The equality of the soul is real. A man 
does not derive truth from Plato ; but from the Over- 
Soul whence Plato himself received it, he too receives 
it; for truth is immanent in the mind and thence 
drawn out : it does not come from without, it is latent. 
Authority therefore is only given by the inward and 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 123 

private warrant, and cannot possibly belong to any 
thing external, whether man or creed or institution. 

This doctrine underlies Emerson's theory of history. 
In his view all history is only the private man's biog- 
raphy writ large. As the mind in perceiving Nature 
creates it, so in apprehending history the mind gives 
it reality ; and as all of Nature exists latently in the 
soul, so all of history preexists in the mind. Man can 
live all history in his own person. "I can find," 
says Emerson, "Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the 
Islands, — the genius and creative principle of each 
and all eras in my own mind;" and again, "There 
is properly no history, only biography ; every mind 
must know the whole lesson for itself, must go over 
the whole ground ; what it does not see, what it does 
not live, it will not know." He conceives of history 
not as a series of events in past time, but as the 
knowledge which the individual mind realizes in itself 
in the present. There is nothing more characteristic 
of his whole mode of thinking than his abolition of 
time, — " This wild, savage, and preposterous There or 
Then." He sees the denial of time, for example, in the 
quality of classicism, that is, that one man seems to have 
written all the books ; in the appeal of old truths and 
ancient works of art continuously valid in the soul, and 
in the appeal of heroic actions to the moral sense of 
every generation and race. The present alone is ; 
here all Nature, all history, all truth are; in other 
words, the universe is totally comprised in the ex- 
perience of the individual under the single formula 
of subjectivity. The insulation of the soul is thus 
complete. Perfect solitude is its habitat. Yet the 
illusion of time is so powerful that nothing is more 









124 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

important in practice than to guard against it, and 
especially against those forms of it under which ex- 
ternal authority encroaches upon the soul's domain by 
means of the fame of great men, the consent of the 
old councils, and the powerful institutions of the race. 
Equally to be rejected are the more tender influences 
of friends and comrades, of family and all intimate 
bonds. A man shall preserve his integrity at any 
cost. He shall be free even of his own past, and re- 
gard consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds. 
By virtue of his identity with men he is the equal of 
all others ; by virtue of his identity with God he has 
a private and direct access to all truth, beauty, and 
goodness ; by his constitution all knowledge is latent 
in his mind, all experience is there preexistent, and 
if he will but obey his constitution, and look for no 
support elsewhere, the Over-Soul will providentially 
develop in him all that is his, and bring to him his 
own. To believe on insight, which is Intuition, and 
f o act spontaneously, which is Impulse, constitute 
".elf -reliance, in the positive sense ; to reject the past 
n all its forms, as authority, and maintain toward it 
a sovereign attitude, is the negative and precautionary 
side of the virtue. 

Acquiescence, spontaneity, and self-reliance, never- 
theless, do not exhaust the active virtue of the soul. 
Action requires another and a crowning grace ; it 
should have abandonment. Upon the passive or 
receptive side it has been already observed that the 
relation with the Over-Soul is characterized in the high 
examples by mania, — visions, trances, epilepsies ; 
abandonment, in Emerson's use of the word, signifies 
a corresponding excitement on the active side of the 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 125 

same relation, — a certain madness or ecstasy in the 
energy put forth. The theory of ecstasy, or an obliv- 
ion of ends in the surplusage of overflowing vigor, con- 
sidered as the method of Nature, has been sufficiently 
touched on in a preceding chapter. Nature instructs 
man not only by this general fact, but in detail. She 
sends no creature, no man, into the world without 
adding a small excess of his proper quality. No man 
is quite sane, but each has some determination of blood 
to the head to hold him to the point which Nature 
desires. Over-faith, over-importance are necessary to 
the conduct of reforms. In larger matters every in- 
tellectual man learns that besides his own and con- 
scious power he is capable of a new energy by aban- 
donment to the nature of things, such that then he is 
" caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is 
thunder, his thought is law, and his words are uni- 
versally intelligible as the plants and animals." 
The poet especially speaks adequately only when he 
speaks " somewhat wildly." Men avail themselves of 
such means as they can to add this extraordinary 
power to their own, and hence love wine, opium, 
fumes, or false intoxication, and follow gaming or 
war to ape in some manner the enthusiasm of the 
heart. "The one thing we seek with insatiable 
desire," says Emerson, " is to do something without 
knowing how or why. Nothing great was ever achieved 
without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful ; 
it is by abandonment." It is the same on the social 
scale. The great movements of history have been 
the enthusiasms of mankind for an idea ; the great 
religions have been "the ejaculations of a few im- 
aginative men." 



126 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

Ecstasy, therefore, which attends any great dis- 
closure of religious truth or the flood of ideas in any 
field, and which in the poet and the saint has its 
most glowing individual force, is not to be regarded 
as exceptional and dubious, but as fundamental and 
one of the higher laws. " I hold," says EmersoD, 
"that ecstasy will be found normal, or only an 
example on a higher plane of the same gentle gravita- 
tion by which stones fall and rivers run." It is to 
be aimed at in conduct, and is only a name for the 
excess, or higher degree, of spontaneity and self- 
reliance and acquiescence, the extreme of those, as in 
martyrs and conquerors and prophets, and in men 
who obey an inner impulse absolutely in spite of the 
oppositions and appearances of things. Ecstasy, or 
abandonment, is the measure of the vital force of the 
spirit in men, its self-assertive and self-neglectful 
power ; and in proportion to its fulness is its scorn of 
consequences. The largest release of the divine energy 
is the end. Its sensual form is in the orgiastic sects, 
the dervish and the maenad ; its spiritual form is in the 
illuminate of every age and race ; its practical form 
is in the conquerors who follow their star, leaders of 
crusades and scourges of God, men raised up to 
hew the heathen or advance the crescent. In lesser 
men all those who are drunk with a belief, or absorbed 
in a faculty, obey it. It is the fatal drop which added 
to life makes it a cup of intoxication. Such is the 
weakness of men that few in any age avail themselves 
of the greatening power of abandonment ; but these 
are those who accomplish the fates and works of the 
race, — empires, religions, poems. 

Thus the wisdom of life when summed lies in a 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 127 

complete and enthusiastic surrender to God alone, 
such that every thought and act shall give free course 
to the divine, streaming into the soul and energizing 
there under the control of the Over-Will. It was a 
happy suggestion of one of Emerson's commentators 
that what he called self-reliance was God-reliance j for 
the difficulty of the negation of the egoistic will, which 
is commonly thought of as the substance of self-reli- 
ance, is thus avoided. The elimination of the personal 
will, which Emerson advises, is strongly supported by 
his doctrine of the indifferency of means to an end. 
This is a development from the idea of the microcosm. 
Since the soul contains the whole within itself and 
moves to its manifestation in knowledge, it is indiffer- 
ent at what point development begins or in what order 
the process goes on ; just as in Nature, all of the uni- 
verse being in each part and related to every other 
part, it is indifferent whether one learns from this or 
from that, for finally the whole will appear. The doc- 
trine of indifferency is given immense extension also 
by the idea that Nature is a symbolization of truth, 
and hence any part of Nature can yield up not only 
natural but moral knowledge and be employed for 
the interpretation of any portion of the field. " I can 
symbolize my thought by using the name of any 
creature, of any fact," says Emerson ; and again, 
" each new form repeats not only the main character of 
the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, 
furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system 
of every other ; " and, more broadly of human life, 
"every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a eoni- 
pend of the world and a correlative of every other. 
Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its 



128 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course, and its 
end." So the "true doctrine of omnipresence is that 
God reappears with all his parts in every moss and 
cobweb," or the " value of the universe continues to 
throw itself into every point." The universality of the 
symbolic language thus makes the task of the poet 
easy. " The poorest experience is rich enough for all 
the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a 
knowledge of new facts? Day and night, a house and 
garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as 
would all trades and all spectacles." The poet is the 
true scientist because he uses all facts as signs and 
" rides on them as the horses of thought." What the 
poet can do all men can do ; the universal language of 
Nature is in each word of it a key to all her meanings, 
and the soul wherever it may be is in possession of it. 
The situation of the soul is therefore indifferent ; it is 
sovereign and has the full powers of sovereignty and 
all the means of knowledge in every place. There is 
thus no reason for preference ; one position in life is 
as good as another. The doctrine of the equality of 
souls is thus supplemented by the doctrine of the 
equivalence of conditions ; and these two taken in 
connection with the doctrine that the order of the pro- 
cess of development is a matter of indifference, make 
a sufficient ground for the relinquishment by the soul 
of any volition, properly speaking. The annihilation 
of the will is brought about by the denial of its 
function. 

Emerson's name for tnis indifferency in circum- 
stances is the law of compensation. The world is dual, 
as is seen in the general scientific fact of polarity ; and 
every part is dual, since the entire system gets repre- 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 129 

sented in every, particle, so that "there is somewhat 
that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, day and 
night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, 
in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal 
tribe." This duality, however, is only an aspect of 
unity, for the parts are fatally linked, and one cannot 
be had without the other ; no loss without the gain, no 
wit without the folly, no crime without the punish- 
ment. The divergence, the separation, the opposition, 
are only apparent; life is an integration of the two 
elements, and the law of compensation lies in the 
necessity of the integration. Man cannot have a part, 
but must take the whole. The error of the understand- 
ing is in thinking that the sweet can be possessed 
without the bitter, the sensual without the moral, one 
side of nature without the other side. Our action is 
overmastered above our will by the law of Nature, 
which integrates a whole out of the two parts, and this 
integrating action is Nemesis, a power to add penalty 
to the wrong-doing and a power to add happiness to 
the suffering. The law, however, does not apply to 
the soul's own nature, for in it there is no duality; it 
is real being and not a part of Nature, and in all its 
affirmative action it creates, it adds to the world ; 
virtue, wisdom, are "proper additions of being." 
There remains, therefore, the obligation to affirm the 
soul as a power which increases, while the modes of 
its increase in the special conditions that surround it 
should be left to the providence that enfolds it and 
flows into it and determines its process by a higher 
law, — a law, that is, above man's will. 

The proper action of the soul is further defined by 
what in the lack of a better name may be styled the 



130 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

doctrine of the wholeness. No part of Emerson's 
theory is more fundamental, and none is more char- 
acteristic. The soul is not itself a faculty, like the 
intellect or the will ; but is that which uses these 
faculties. If it acts partially by one faculty, it is 
liable to error ; but if it acts with its whole nature, it 
cannot err. This is another mode of saying that if a 
man obeys his constitution, he will be in the right. 
Here is Emerson's only sanction of morality; "the 
only right is what is after my constitution, the only 
wrong what is against it." A man cannot violate his 
own nature, in any case ; but error lies in setting up 
one part of it by itself. The blindness of the intel- 
lect, the weakness of the will, begin when each would 
be something of itself. The same idea is present in 
the maxim that there is a descent when men leave 
speaking of the moral nature to urge a particular vir- 
tue which it enjoins; for the soul lives in the region 
and source of all virtues, and is above the particular 
virtues, such as justice and benevolence ; virtue in the 
abstract is innate and immanent, it is only necessary 
to speak to the heart, and the man "becomes sud- 
denly virtuous." In applying the doctrine what 
emerges is a certain warfare or opposition of the uni- 
versal and particular in life. The soul is by its nature 
universal, and is then in the right course when it 
moves toward the universals, — Virtue, Beauty, Truth ; 
but in life, putting on limitations, it stands in peril 
by the fact that it moves to particular ends. 

Following the method of ecstasy, as has been set 
forth in treating of Nature, the soul like Nature 
should be indifferent to ends. An end is a finality, a 
cul-de-sac of the soul, and once arrived there the soul 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 131 

so far perishes, since all power ceases in the moment 
of repose. Finalities are therefore to be avoided. 
Specialization of all kinds is a sort of finality. The 
man, as was set forth in the Phi Beta Kappa Address, 
by becoming a particular sort of man, a mechanic, a 
politician, a doctor, ends in so dwarfing his nature 
that he becomes as it were a tool ; he is no longer a 
complete man, but partial and ever growing less. It 
is the same with reforms and all particularities of 
method ; it is better not to commit oneself to agencies, 
but to begin higher up at the source of reform by be- 
ing oneself a man of moral power. It is the same 
with books : one should not rest in them, but out- 
grow them, and leave them behind. It is the same 
with all works of art : the best pictures soon tell all 
their secret, and when you have seen one well, you 
must take your leave of it. It is the same with per- 
sons: our affections are tents of a night, and the heart 
rises through them to impersonal loves. Performance 
and individual relations, in other words, contain final- 
ity ; and if the mind rests in achievement of its own, 
or narrows its energies toward achievement, it becomes 
confined and partial ; or if it rests in the achievement 
of others, as books or works of art, it limits itself in 
a similar way and becomes bound. Life is a continual 
freeing of the soul, the summing of a total power. 
We value total qualities as we grow older, character 
above performance ; and we are disappointed in men, 
especially men of genius, because their works are not 
a symphony of all their powers, but the product of 
some overgrown talent. 

The quality of life is not finality, but to be forever 
initial. All the virtues are initial, all thought is 



132 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

initial; even art, so far as it has value, is initial by 
means of the universalizing power it contains. Hence 
it is not ends that count, not what is accomplished ; 
but the value of action lies wholly in the tendency 
shown, the direction given, the increase of power 
brought about, the exercise of the soul in its whole 
nature and toward the sphere of the universal. That 
sphere is very close. "It seems not worth while," 
says Emerson, " to execute with too much pains some 
one intellectual or sesthetical or civil feat, when pres- 
ently the dream will scatter and we shall burst into 
universal power. " It is our servitude to particulars 
that betrays us into foolish expectations of immediate 
changes in the world, of regeneration worked by loco- 
motives or balloons, by enactments of law, mechanical 
social devices, or electromagnetism. This "hankering 
after an overt practical effect" is an "apostasy." "I 
am very content with knowing, if only I could know." 
One should not be cowed by the name of Action, as 
if the mind needed " an outside badge," a prayer- 
meeting, a great donation or a high office, "to testify 
it is somewhat." Action, in other words, has too 
much of the particular in its nature, and enslaves. 
To escape the particular without, and the correspond- 
ing specialization and limitation of the soul within, 
is the path of wisdom. Facts, ideas, persons, as par- 
ticulars, are a clog and hindrance ; they are serviceable 
only as they cease to be final and become initial ; when 
facts give up their symbolic meaning and the scientist 
becomes the poet, when ideas lead upward from phys- 
ical to moral laws, when persons release our love till 
it leaves them and is changed into worship of the 
highest, when books and works of art and things of 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 133 

beauty enfranchise us from themselves into the uni- 
versal world, then they perform true service. 

In the flux of the world, where all is movement and 
transition, to stand still is the one peril ; and it is in 
these particulars that fixation has its seat and throne. 
Such fixation resides in all creeds, in the person of 
Christ, for example, in the masterhood of Aristotle, in 
the dominion of the church ; or in pictures and statues 
that make an academic tradition ; or in science which 
is content to be only classified knowledge of material 
things ; or in social reforms embodied in institutions 
and rules ; or in the persons of our friends to whom 
we are humanly attached for themselves. But move- 
ment is the law of life, to go on, to change, to ascend. 
The ideal aim is to preserve the wholeness of the soul 
from this dispersion, and its energy from this arrest in 
particulars ; to value tendency above accomplishment, 
power above results, being above doing ; and so to 
seek after and live in the universal more and more, 
where alone is the infinite into which the soul 
must itself unfold. What is primary in the doc- 
trine of the wholeness is the infinite nature of the 
soul, its innate opposition to finite ends and finite 
things, and the necessity it is under to keep its effort 
single and its total being directed away from things 
finite toward the universal ; or if it must engage itself 
with them, to pass through them as temporalities. 

Such, then, being the nature of action in its broad 
outlines, what is experience ? It is a swift succession 
in which there is an evanescence and lubricity of all 
objects, which is " the most unhandsome part of our 
condition." It is a series of illusions, governed much 
by temperament, as to their character in each indi- 



134 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

vidual, and if deceptive, yet educative. It is a move- 
ment through moments and surfaces, wherefore it is 
wisdom to make the most of every moment, to accept 
the condition temporarily existing, and to live always 
with respect to the present. In this general flux of 
all things and procession of the moods of the soul, 
the reality is the unity within, the soul, which surfers 
no co-life of anything else with itself but escapes from 
all partiality, even from personal love and friendship 
and returns to the universal and impersonal, to 
the contemplation and the energy of God. The test 
of true living is always on that side of the soul which 
is turned toward the universal, not on that which looks 
to the finite, and it contains a mystical element, a sense 
of revelation and of privacy with God. With regard 
to the great intuitions, Emerson describes the test 
thus : " When good is near you, when you have life in 
yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way ; 
you shall not discern the footprints of any other ; 
you shall not see the face of man ; you shall not hear 
any name ; the way, the thought, the good, shall be 
wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example 
and experience." With respect to thought, he uses 
slightly different phrases: "We do not determine 
what we will think. We only open our senses, clear 
away, as we can, all obstructions from the fact, and 
suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over 
our thoughts ; we are the prisoners of ideas. They 
catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully 
engage us that we take no heed for the morrow, gaze 
like children without an effort to make them our own. 
By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us 
where we have been, what we have seen, and repeat 



it.] THE ESSAYS 135 

as truly as we can what we have beheld. As far as 
we can recall these ecstasies, we carry away in the 
ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all 
the ages confirm it. It is called Truth." Or in yet 
another mode : " When I converse with a profound 
mind, or if at any time being alone I have good 
thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as 
when being thirsty I drink water, or go to the fire 
being cold; no! but I am at first apprised of my 
vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By 
persisting to read or to think, this region gives fur- 
ther sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sud- 
den discoveries of its profound beauty and repose. . . . 
But every insight from this realm of thought is felt 
as initial and promises a sequel. I do not make it ; 
I arrive there, and behold what was there already. 
I make ! no ! I clap my hands with infinite joy and 
amazement before the first opening of this august 
magnificence, old with the love and homage of in- 
numerable ages, young with the life of life, the sun- 
bright Mecca of the desert. " 

The act of. intending the mind, of persisting in the 
contemplation, of setting siege as it were to the di- 
vine, is the method belonging to this knowledge. The 
issue of such experience is into the universal. "I 
am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the 
imperfect, adore my own Perfect, I am somehow re- 
ceptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook 
the sun and the stars, and feel them to be the fair ac- 
cidents and effects which change and pass. More and 
more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me. . . . 
So come I to live in thoughts and act with energies 
which are immortal." An unspeakable trust is begot- 



136 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

ten ; the soul is sure that its welfare is dear to the heart 
of being ; that it cannot escape from good ; that every- 
thing which belongs to it — wisdom, friends, events — 
shall come home to it by open or winding passages. 
The soul rises to the last knowledge, that of the eter- 
nal One. " This deep power in which we exist, and 
whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self- 
sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of see- 
ing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, are 
one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the 
moon, the animal, the tree ; but the whole, of which 
these are the shining parts, is the soul." 

The soul, therefore, through Nature, the instrument 
of its evolution, is really self-evolved, and so intimate 
is this union with Nature in the operation that the 
soul is hardly to be distinguished in its energy from 
the energy of Nature. The passage which best ex- 
presses this holds in fusion many ideas that have 
been separated in this exposition, and well illustrates 
the habitual presence of Emerson's whole mind in all 
he wrote : — 

" Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a 
thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is 
mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escap- 
ing again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue 
and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, 
whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man 
crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. 
That power which does not respect quantity, which makes 
the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its 
smile to the morning and distils its essence into every drop 
of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object ; for 
wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured 
into us as blood ; it convulsed us as pain ; it slid into us as 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 137 

pleasure ; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days or in days 
of cheerful labor ; we did not guess its essence until after 
a long time." 

This, if one were to give it a name, is a kind of psychic 
animism. 

Indeed, it is rather in his theory of Nature than in 
his theory of God that Emerson astonishes and per- 
plexes the mind. The language and moods of pan- 
theism have been long familiar to men ; the eulogy 
of the soul, the mystery of its states, its exaltations, 
are a twice-told tale in all religious writings ; but in 
the theory of Nature, as set forth by Emerson, there 
is something less ordinary, though not without copious 
illustrations in mystical writers. It is not that Nature 
is presented subjectively as a modification of human 
consciousness, in the formulas of philosophical ideal- 
ism ; but that, within the limits of subjectivity, Nature 
is again as it were taken out of her proper sphere, and 
by the principle of symbolization her phenomenal 
facts are changed into truths, her phenomenal laws 
are transmuted into laws of morals, and her phenom- 
enal operation is held up as a higher instance of the 
working of divine energy than even the life of the 
soul as it is lived by men. Nature in her physical or 
sensational sphere is abolished in order to become a 
thing of intellectual and moral values, for the benefit 
of the soul ; science exists for religion and morality ; 
but at the same time Nature in her own phenomenal 
being is represented as a more perfect example of 
the divine law than is the soul's life in the world. 
Nature is perfect and is set up as the standard ; or, 
in Emerson's words, " Man is fallen ; nature is erect 
and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the 



138 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man." 
This is the theory as to Nature in general ; but in 
every part of Nature there is the divine type which 
the soul should repeat, if it were to lead the true life. 
The passage which exemplifies this is that of the rose. 
" These roses under my window make no reference to 
former roses or to better ones ; they are for what they 
are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time 
to them. There is simply. the rose; it is perfect in 
every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has 
burst, its whole life acts ; in the full-blown flower 
there is no more ; in the leafless root there is no less. 
Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all 
moments alike. But man postpones or remembers ; 
he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye 
laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that sur- 
round him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. 
He cannot be happy and strong until he, too, lives with 
nature, in the present, above time." This, the rose, 
is the ideal of life. The same doctrine is found in 
the apothegm, — " The rich mind lies in the sun and 
sleeps and is nature." 

With such an attitude toward Nature, it is inevi- 
table that the theory of Emerson should sometimes 
seem on the point of breaking its own shell. It has 
been observed that in unfolding ecstasy as the method 
of Nature he found that man could not be regarded as 
the final end of Nature, since man appears too insig- 
nificant a result for such a vast preparation of celestial 
worlds and epochs as the universe exhibits. It be- 
longs with this that Nature as it exists in other intelli- 
gences, such as the rat and the lizard, or in other lower 
forms such as the fungus and the lichen, should seem 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 139 

to Emerson a terra incognita. " What do I know sym- 
pathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of 
life ? " History in taking account only of man writes 
narrow annals. "I hold our actual knowledge very 
cheap," says Emerson. It is but a step, under such a 
system of thought and in such a mood, with such a 
stripping from life of its human values accumulated 
in time and such a return to simplicity as it is in 
natural facts, for Emerson to add "the path of science 
and of letters is not the way into nature " ; but rather 
" the idiot, the Indian, the child, the unschooled 
farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature 
is to be read than the dissector or the antiquary." 
To the type of the rose as the ideal of life, the type of 
the Indian as the method of knowledge, is complemen- 
tary. 

Besides the central ideas and primary counsels that 
make up the body of Emerson's thought, his general 
philosophy should be viewed under a third aspect, 
namely, its bearings on the actual affairs of men in the 
world. The Essays are stored with prudential wis- 
dom ; his mjnd ranged widely through the things of 
the common life, and for this work he was well pre- 
pared by good intentions, ripe judgment, and moral 
sagacity ; moreover, as he grew older, he gave increas- 
ing expression to his practical sense and brought 
the speculative grounds of his views less prominently 
forward ; spiritual philosophy, though he did not hold 
to it less strongly, gave place in his later writings to 
the conduct of life in its details. Though he was an 
optimist, the view he took of the actual condition of 
society and of the individuals who compose it was at no 
time high. He was not at all blind to the evils that 



140 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

infest the world. Every man, he thinks, looks upon 
his actual state " with a degree of melancholy," and 
society is invaded by it secretly and silently ; life wears 
a mean appearance and is full of things ignoble and 
trivial. The key to every age is imbecility, a favourite 
word with him to characterize society and individuals. 
The " fool-part " of mankind is very large, the male- 
factors much in the majority. History has been mean ; 
our nations have been mohs; we have never seen a 
man. Such, nearly in his own words, is the general 
view. In detail, the way of providence is rude, as 
seen in Nature ; it has a " wild, rough, incalculable 
road to its end," and it is of no use "to dress up 
that terrible benefactor in a clean shirt and white neck- 
cloth of a student of divinity." There is the snake, the 
spider, the tiger, other "leapers and bloody jumpers, 
the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the 
anaconda," and man, too, lives by like habits. There 
are earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, the massacre by 
disease, by plague and climate, parasites, and every where 
jaws, — " hints of ferocity in the interiors of Nature." 
In society, the fate of men has never been more calmly 
stated than in the following words : " The German and 
Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano 
in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic and 
carted over America to ditch and to drudge, and then to 
lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on 
the prairie." 

The state of religion naturally holds a foremost 
place in his survey. " I do not find the religions of 
men at this moment very creditable to them." They 
are childish, insignificant, unmanly ; know-nothing 
churches that proscribe intellect, scortatory, slave-hold- 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 141 

ing, and slave-trading religions, idolatries. " In our 
large cities the population is godless, materialized. . . . 
There is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine, in ma- 
chinery, in the steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine 
wheels, sewing machines, and in public opinion, but 
not in divine causes. ... In creeds never was such 
levity ; witness the heathenism in Christianity, the peri- 
odic ' revivals,' the millennium mathematics, the peacock 
ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maunder- 
ing of Mormons, the deliration of rappings, the rat and 
mouse revelations, thumps in table-drawers, and black 
art." It is the same with trade. " The ways of trade 
are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple 
to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud." 
The youth is unfitted for them by genius and virtue, 
and if he would succeed must forget the dreams of 
his boyhood and the prayers of his childhood, and take 
on the harness of routine and obsequiousness. We 
eat, drink, and wear perjury and fraud, and all society 
is compromised by purchase and consumption, so that 
the sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual ; 
every one is privy and an accomplice. All accumulated 
wealth is tainted, and it might be honester to renounce 
it and go back to the soil. The soil itself is engaged 
in the same vice ; " of course, whilst another man has 
no land, my title to mine, your title to yours, is at once 
vitiated." 

The state of politics wears a like complexion. Ameri- 
can radicalism is destructive and aimless ; the conserv- 
ative party is merely defensive of property while " it 
indicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands 
no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not 
build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, 



142 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor eman- 
cipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Ind- 
ian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in 
power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, 
art, or humanity at all commensurate with the resources 
of the nation." Official government falls into gradual 
contempt, and there is " an increasing disposition of 
private adventurers to assume its fallen functions." 
The contemporary socialistic movement proceeded from 
a feeling that government had abdicated its true offices, 
that " in the scramble for the public purse the main du- 
ties of government were omitted, — the duty to]instruct 
the ignorant, to supply the poor with work, and with 
good guidance." Such paternalism is a main function 
of the state. The government must educate the poor 
man. Every child must have a just chance for his 
bread. "A man has a right to be employed, to be 
trusted, to be loved, to be revered." It is not that 
Emerson has any regard for the masses, in the 
ordinary sense : " Leave this hypocritical prating 
about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, 
pernicious in their demands and influence, and 
need not to be flattered but to be schooled. I wish 
not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, 
divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of 
them. The worst of charity is that the lives you are 
asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses ! 
the calamity is the masses." He rather desires a re- 
striction of the population by government, were that 
practicable. Individualism, however, is the principle 
that most conquers in his theory, by virtue of which 
he is brought into strong opposition against legisla- 
tion, governmental reform, and all varieties of socialism. 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 143 

" The less government we have the better," he says ; 
and again, " the basis of political economy is non-inter- 
ference. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap 
the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no boun- 
ties ; make equal laws ; secure life and property, and 
you need not give alms. ... In a free and just 
commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and im- 
becile to the industrious, brave, and persevering." As 
to property, there need never be any fear for it. Prop- 
erty is a main end of government and follows character; 
it is power in the hands of the powerful who therefore 
have it, and will make itself count in any system of 
government, for it cannot be bound ; but so far as there 
is any question of property, let amelioration in its 
laws " proceed from the concession of the rich, not 
from the grasping of the poor." Eeforms by special 
instrumentalities are a chimera. " The Eeform of re- 
forms must be accomplished without means." All 
particular remedies are " a buzz in the ear." Socialism, 
in particular, looks to an outward union, whereas the 
only useful union is purely inward, a likeness of nature 
freely exercised individually and not by corporate 
means ; " the union is only perfect when all the uniters 
are isolated." Eeform in any case, and especially 
legislative reform, is nullified by the law of things 
above our will. We devise protective measures, but 
the principle of population reduces wages to the lowest 
scale consistent with life ; our charity increases pau- 
perism ; our paper currency and credits issue in bank- 
ruptcy. It is better to limit government to the least. 
It does its best work in assuring an open career and 
equal opportunity for the poor, and in guarding against 
whatever makes for inequality in the conditions of 



144 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

the social strife, whether by wealth or privilege in any 
form. 

To establish the principle of individualism and 
secure the freest field for its operation is the sum and 
substance of Emerson's statecraft. He admits of pa- 
ternalism for the sake of the poor and to provide such 
social goods as are beyond the scope of private means 
only. He is very tender of the poor, and surrounds 
their state with dignity and a certain idolatry. The 
whole interest of history, he says, lies in the fortunes 
of the poor, in such persons as have extricated them- 
selves from the jaws of need by superior wit and might. 
The first-class minds have known the poor man's 
estate, the feeling and mortification of the poor man ; 
such were Socrates, Alfred, Shakespeare, Cervantes, 
Franklin, and the highest type of man is he who 
knows the huts where poor men live and the chores 
they do. The wise workman will not regret the 
poverty that brought out his working talents, and the 
future of the world will be best served by the victories 
of peace which he wins, relying on good work rather 
than on cunning tariffs to succeed in the competition of 
the nations. Government so far as it helps in this 
peaceful progress, in this open career and free oppor- 
tunity for men and nations, is useful. But govern- 
ment as it exists is a thing of little respect. It rests 
on force, but the ordering principle of the world should 
be love. " We live, " he says, " in a very low state of 
the world." There is nowhere a sufficient belief in 
the moral sentiment to persuade men " that society can 
be maintained without artificial restraint as well as 
the solar system" ; no man has ever endeavoured 
to renovate the state on this principle. "I do 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 145 

not call to mind," says Emerson, "a single human 
being who has steadily denied the authority of the 
laws on the simple ground of his own moral nature." 
Emerson is not tender of the laws. Good men should 
not obey the laws too well. " The highest virtue," he 
says, " is always against the law." 

It is plain that, as for him the true church is in- 
dividual, each man by himself in union with the Over- 
Soul, erect and sovereign over the faith, so the ideal 
state is individual, each man by himself in obedience 
to the moral sentiment within him, erect and sovereign 
over his own actions. It is in this spirit that he 
describes the wise man, he who " makes the state un- 
necessary." " The wise man is the state. He needs 
no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too well ; no 
bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him ; no vant- 
age-ground, no favourable circumstances. He needs no 
library, for he has not done thinking ; no church, for he 
is a prophet ; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver ; 
no money, for he is value ; no road, for he is at home 
wherever he is ; no experience, for the life of the 
creator shoots through him and looks from his eyes. 
He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell 
to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him 
needs not husband and educate a few, to share with 
him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is 
angelic ; his memory is myrrh to them ; his presence 
frankincense and flowers." And again he develops the 
same ideal in a passage yet more subtly touched with 
the intoxication that he loved, and draws the portrait 
only to lament that there is no original : " Of a purely 
spiritual life history has afforded no example. I 
mean, we have yet no man who has leaned entirely 



146 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

on his character, and eaten angels' food ; who, trusting 
to his sentiments, found life made of miracles ; who, 
working for universal aims, found himself fed he 
knew not how ; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed he 
knew not how ; and yet it was done by his own hands. 
Only in the instinct of the lower animals we find the 
suggestion of the methods of it, and something higher 
than our understanding. .The squirrel hoards nuts, 
and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what 
they do, and they are thus provided for without self- 
ishness or disgrace/' 

Emerson's optimism in the practical field is restricted 
to the tendency of things, to that ascension that we 
know as evolution, which is a law of the universe. 
The organized world, he thinks, and the life lived in it, 
with the presence of ferocity in Nature and imbecility 
in man, is the best that is possible at the moment, 
and the evil elements are clogs of lower organization 
from which life is relieved in a change to higher types 
and conditions. This state of the world is at all 
times a melancholy one. On the other hand he can 
see no progress, due to human initiative, in society ; he 
repeatedly affirms the view that social evolution is a 
change and not an advance ; and he continually la- 
ments the fact that Nature is denied her true heir, 
that no complete man is or has ever been. He finds 
a philosophic optimism in the doctrine that all ine- 
qualities of social condition disappear in the nature of 
the soul. The passage is an interesting one : — 

" In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the 
inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature 
seems to be the distinction of More and Less. How can 
Less not feel the pain ; how not feel indignation or malevo- 






iv.]" THE ESSAYS 147 

lence toward More ? Look at those who have less faculty 
and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it. 
He almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. 
What should they do ? It seems a great injustice. But see 
the facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities vanish. 
Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. 
The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of 
His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my brother, and 
my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by 
great neighbors, I can yet love ; I can still receive ; and he 
that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. There- 
by I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, 
acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I 
so admired and envied is my own." 

Mr. John Morley, commenting on the passage, says, — 
" Surely words, words, words ! " 

Optimism of such a stripe, in connection with the 
general and vigorous impeachment of all government, 
society, and history which Emerson made, is not what 
is commonly meant by that term. It is to be borne in 
mind, nevertheless, in reckoning with his criticism of 
the world, that he lived in a time when the attack upon 
the state as defective on moral grounds was violently 
made by the best men, owing to slavery, and also that 
he had felt in his own person very keenly the ostracism 
and scorn of the religious and cultivated classes, and 
this gives edge to his retort very often in dealing with 
both church and state and all the subject of the value 
of the educated, protected, and conservative class. It 
must also be remembered that through the experience 
of the Civil War he came into a firmer grasp of the 
efficiency of organized society and the worth of its 
labours. But as in religion he retained to the end his 
primary intuitional faith, so in politics he held to the 
cardinal principles of individualism ; personal freedom 



148 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

was his idea in both, and the one leads in this phi- 
losophy to the denial of any outward church, and the 
other to the denial of any external government. With 
such an ideal and such tendencies, it was impossible for 
Emerson to take an optimistic view of social condi- 
tions as they exist, nor did he do so ; his optimism was a 
hope of the future, so far as it had any practical form, 
and was confined to his faith in America, in the gospel 
of nature, in the ascending life of the soul and in the 
divine energy ; of their final victory he felt assured ; 
but no fair reading of the text can present Emerson as 
a practical optimist in his view of things as they are. 
So far is that from being the case that he is more 
justly to be set down as a revolutionary without the 
quality of action. 

In its application to individual life, Emerson's 
doctrine gives results that are, perhaps, more indebted 
to his sagacity than to his philosophic views, though the 
latter are never far off. It is obvious in these essays 
that he is fascinated by the idea of power. He respects 
the strong, the successful, and affirmative natures, those 
who take the world as they find it and make it obey 
their will. He has the liking for rude natures that 
sometimes characterizes the refined and retired man 
who feels the attraction of opposites. He acknow- 
ledges a leaning to the most forcible rather than the 
most civil. " These Hoosiers and Suckers are really 
better than the snivelling opposition. " He approves 
the common opinion that " a little wickedness is good 
to make muscle." Virile natures must have some in- 
fusion of riot and adventure, some energy of earth in 
them ; they do not come out of Sunday schools ; they 
do not eat nuts. They have that genuineness and real- 






iv.] THE ESSAYS 149 

ity which belong to primitive things, to actuality and 
decision. Similarly, Emerson indulges the strong in 
its great types, such as Napoleon, who interested him, 
it would seem, more than any other man in history. 
Power he defines as " a sharing of the nature of the 
world " ; its secret is to be able to bring to bear in your 
stroke the whole force of things, an obedience to law in 
order to use it ; and its place, where, as it were, power 
is funded, is character. He defines character as " the 
moral order seen through the medium of an individ- 
ual nature." So heroism in its turn is " an obedience 
to a secret impulse of an individual's character." He 
values aristocracy and property as effects and cer- 
tificates of power of character, and gives them an im- 
portant place in life when they rightfully stand for 
such power; success is but another name for the same 
thing. 

Emerson in no way withdrew from life. He bids one 
accept the conditions, play the game, take the stakes ; 
in fact, his prudential wisdom is mainly directed to 
the winning of success, with a caution that the world 
is not to be conformed to, but braved and made to 
obey the individual. In working out his counsels as 
to wealth and economy, heroism and character, and 
like subjects, he displays ripe judgment and often has 
a Baconian turn. In the cognate subjects of educa- 
tion, culture, behaviour, and manners he shows the same 
qualities. He thinks little of the education, less of 
the educated class of the day; he does not favour 
travel in general ; he emphasizes the element of kind- 
liness in society and praises companionableness. For 
the most part in these practical discourses he deals with 
minor morals and mundane phases of life ; but in the 



150 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

treatment there is always some touch that seems to 
lift everyday counsels into a higher sphere, to give 
them purity and light. He passes them through all the 
planes of his thought, and character or heroism glows 
red or blue as he flashes one or the other prismatic 
ray of his transcendentalism through them, and this 
makes his writing on these topics differ from all other 
men's. Transcendentalism appears very strongly in 
the discussion of beauty and art. In no part of his 
writings does he show more impatience with perform- 
ance, with the result; as when he declares all pictures 
and statues to be " cripples and monsters," and adds, — 
" I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain 
appearance of paltriness, as of toys and the trumpery 
of a theatre, in sculpture." He plainly found more 
satisfaction in natural landscape than in any painting, 
and in the postures of life than in any statue. He 
admits art because he perceives its relation to the uni- 
versal, but the fixity of art troubles and baulks him ; 
he finds the quality of beauty to lie in its flowing 
nature, and the perfection of art to be in its represent- 
ing " a transition from that which is representable 
to the senses to that which is not." 

If his analysis and praise of art seem to some lim- 
ited, others will find the transcendentalism of the essays 
on Love and Friendship a difficult matter, so far at least 
as he brings forward the one ungracious doctrine that 
his works contain, the idea that the soul should not en- 
gage itself with persons except as a means to a life with- 
out persons. The principle he affirms is of Platonic 
origin, but Plato did not attach to it the denial of the 
affections. Emerson adheres to the essential solitude 
of the soul and to the ideal of an impersonal love of 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 151 

the great abstractions — Virtue, Truth, and Beauty — 
as the highest form under which God can be contem- 
plated. He holds that a higher love destroys a lower 
love; no bond can keep the heart faithful to the 
lower after the call of the higher. We thus outgrow 
our friends, and abandon them. He maintains that 
"love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness 
from other men " ; that " friends such- as we desire 
are dreams and fables " ; that, like books, " I would 
have them where I can find them, but I seldom use 
them " ; that friends " descend to meet " ; that one 
should love his superiors and cannot love his infe- 
riors ; and that the use of friends is to assist us through 
love of the perfection of being in them to love of im- 
personal being, so that when we have found their 
limitations and therefore cease to be interested in them, 
we are emancipated from the temporary personal attach- 
ment and become free and alone in the love of God. 
In these two essays the divine ichor seems to take the 
place of man's blood; yet both are remarkable for 
their tenderness and a certain purity of high feeling 
and proud and reverent honour done to human nature, 
and are characterized by a singular nobility in their 
detached thoughts. 

To complete the general view of Emerson's philoso- 
phy, it is necessary to take notice of what he elimi- 
nated. The most important of the eliminations was 
what he designated as Hebraism ; that is, religious 
truth of former times arrested and fixed in sacred 
symbols, in creeds and persons ; and, in particular, the 
authority of Christ, the Apostles and saints. The 
entire Christian mythos, including the conception of 
God and the dogma of the church with all its rites 



152 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

and discipline, was rejected as belonging to the 
past, dead in spirit, and now an obstacle to the direct 
and infinite life of the soul with the divine. Emer- 
son also discarded what he designated as Gothi- 
cism ; that is, the doctrine of suffering as a religious 
element, whether as sacrifice or as divine vengeance 
on the soul after death. He eliminated, again, the 
idea of sin, or evil. Under his affirmations of the 
universal operation of the divine in the soul and in 
Nature there was no room for evil in the universe; 
it could be only the privation of good, and negative. 
It is true that Emerson saw the scourges of life, both 
natural and moral ; but he interpreted them as means 
of good in one or another way, and as transition states 
in an ascending series, which perished each in the 
birth of the next higher. Barbarism is largely a 
matter of perspective; and as we now describe past 
usages as barbarous, so future ages will term our 
own manners and customs and ideas. It is because 
of his attitude toward evil that Emerson is called an 
optimist. He was shut in a theory which allowed no 
other course, and he was not interested in the subject 
itself. In practical moral life he declared against 
penitence and remorse ; one should forget the sin 
committed and not waste time and force over the 
dead past; nature was unrepentant, and so should 
man be. He eliminated also prayer; but when a man 
of so spiritual and devout a nature omits prayer from 
life, it is because he has found some other attitude 
more consonant with his soul, and in Emerson's case 
it was an attitude of complete trust in the divine 
and adoration of its presence. The fact remains that 
prayer as an appeal makes no part of life as he con- 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 153 

ceived it, or of man's attitude to God. Lastly he 
eliminated immortality. He does, indeed, discuss 
somewhat academically the question of conscious ex- 
istence after death, but his heart is little in it. To 
him the impersonal and unconscious in the universe 
was far more than the personal and intelligent, for 
these last pertain only to life and even there they are 
only for man. The character of man's being after 
death was of as little interest as that of his being 
before birth. The obsession of Emerson's mind with 
the idea of the presentness of life at every moment — 
which was only the finite form and equivalent of the 
idea of its eternal being — the conception, that is, of 
the soul as " above time " in its essence, even in its 
mortal state, was so great as to leave no room for 
the idea of immortality or the prolongation of person- 
ality beyond the change of death. These eliminations 
of the Christian mythos in all its defined forms, and 
of sin, prayer, and immortality, set Emerson apart 
from Christian writers. It may be that to some, and 
possibly to an increasing number, his ideas with re- 
gard to sin, prayer, and immortality may seem to 
belong to a higher state of moral being and spiritual- 
minded ness than the traditionary beliefs ; if it be so, 
he would still be related to Christianity only as Stoi- 
cism was to popular pagan religion. 

What emerges from these doctrines of identity, 
blending God, Nature, and the soul, and of equiva- 
lences making the whole equal to every particle and 
every particle to the whole, and of the universals, 
Virtue, Truth, and Beauty, with the great counsels 
of Intuition and Impulse as the rule of life, is after 
all the simple infinity of the soul. That is the text, 



154 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

and the rest is comment. The life of the soul as 
known to us is indeed but an infinitesimal arc ; but it is 
enough to show us the infinity of the curve. The soul 
does not exist by doing nor rest in attainment, but lives 
by being ; so to be is the prerequisite of either so to do 
or so to know. The soul seeks its end in an infinity of 
pure power. Miracle is the base of the whole scheme; 
it rests on miracle. Nature is the hieroglyphic of God, 
and the soul is the palimpsest of God ; and one writ- 
ing translates the other, and the meaning is God. The 
idea of law, as it is modernly conceived in science, gives 
the conception of necessity to the operation of the 
divine energy, and pervades the whole of the thought 
under the non-scientific disguise of religion and mo- 
rality. Emerson's doctrines of optimism, acquiescence, 
impulse, evolution, are all held within the limits of, 
and largely result from, this primary conception of a 
supreme and necessary order above man's will. The 
idea of the divine energy, as in all pantheistic systems, 
necessarily empties life of human energy, or tends 
to do so; and hence the misprision of the will, the 
intellect and the affections, of science and art, of 
literature and institutions, is an integral part and not 
merely a corollary or incident of the doctrine. Viewed 
more nearly, the doctrine denies the church and the 
state, and sets up the sovereignty of the individual soul 
in all things of belief and conduct as a court without 
appeal, self-sufficing and self-executing. Its general 
tendency is destructive, and in its affirmations it often 
leads to dubious ground ; anarchy, theosophy, and 
Christian Science find many comforting texts scattered 
through these works, and minds not held in restraint 
by such a constitution as Emerson had may find strange 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 155 

uses for his thought ; for Emerson's constitution acted 
as a safety valve for what was dubious in the doctrine. 
The doctrine, it must be allowed, is anti-Christian, 
anti-scientific, and anti-social ; but in many instances 
these have been historically traits of religious doctrine. 
Christianity was itself against pagan gods and Hebrew 
formalism, broke the career of the human reason, and 
gave a blow to its scientific development from which 
civilization recovered only after centuries and with 
difficulty ; and it also contained a challenge to the 
kingdom of this world which though turned aside 
still persists in its theory and gave justification to 
Emerson's taunt, — " every Stoic was a Stoic, but in 
Christendom where is the Christian?" From every 
point of view it is a religious doctrine that Emerson 
elaborated, and he so maintained it. Platonism lies 
back of its divine metaphysics ; Montaigne offered a 
model for its free inquiries and its personal base ; 
Plutarch and Bacon are back of its practical and moral 
human nature. The general view discloses otherwise 
its heterogeneous and eclectic composition intellectu- 
ally, and its imperfect culture ; but if Emerson read 
few books, he remains an example of how a few great 
books can be read to great ends. 

If it be asked as to the truth of the doctrine, the 
wiser course is to allow their will to the disciples of 
Emerson and those who loved and honoured him and 
heard him gladly in their life, and who troubled them- 
selves little as to his ideas but bathed their spirits in 
his influence. Truth, too, in religion, has never been 
essential, in the sense of ascertained knowledge, but 
large mixtures of known error have been quite consist- 
ent with great serviceableness. The doctrine, what- 



156 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

ever be its truth, has high moral qualities. It is very- 
free, and gives the mind leave to knock off all shackles 
of tradition and authority, and sets an example in so 
doing. It is very brave, and enjoins upon the soul all 
the perils of non-conformity and loneliness with only 
itself for counsellor and friend, for comfort and succour. 
It is very inspiring, and in hearts of a natural courage 
and vitality it rouses all their force and looses all their 
heat by giving rein to enthusiasm. It is thus a power- 
ful dissolvent, and a mighty stimulant. It is the ally 
of all revolution. By these qualities it has worked 
upon men in a time adapted to such counsels and in a 
country to whose instincts of freedom and power, of 
individualism and construction, of democracy and prog- 
ress, it strongly appeals, being indeed one with these 
instincts and the product of them. It is true that its 
ideal man, in whom only the doctrine would be con- 
summated, nowhere appears and may never appear; 
but the American ideal of manhood is stamped with 
these qualities of freedom, bravery, and self-sover- 
eignty, in which the power, as distinguished from the 
tenets, of the doctrine consists. The teaching of Em- 
erson is formative of great qualities in the nation, 
combining with ten thousand other influences that 
there work for a conscious ideal of manhood. It must 
be added, too, that Emerson himself lived by this doc- 
trine ; nothing is more evident than that it is the truth, 
to use his phrase, according to his constitution; and 
in it he stamped an image of himself that is better 
than biography, better even than autobiography — it 
is the man. And here again by the features of this 
doctrine, its mingling of physics and being, its divorce 
from Christian my thology, its freedom from past civili- 



iv.] THE ESSAYS 157 

zation, its priority to science and logic, its truly primi- 
tive method of thought in conducting the mind still 
untrained and still grasping knowledge imperfectly, one 
is reminded of the early sages of Greece, such men as 
Empedocles at Acragas. In the uneven development 
of the human mind, in its brief progress and casual 
fortunes, it must happen that analogous types should 
be repeated in far different ages and races ; and the 
position that Emerson occupied was not essentially so 
different from that of the Ionian sage. Emerson was 
a self-isolated thinker, and intellectually the creature 
of his religious moods. The Essays are not a book 
of knowledge, of science, of reason, of civilization in 
orderly development through the institutional life of 
man and the slow ascertainment of truth by the hard 
joint labour of many minds ; they are a book of religion. 



CHAPTER V 

THE POEMS 

Emerson, as has been said, was fundamentally a 
poet with an imperfect faculty of expression. By no 
means a perfect master of prose, he was much less a 
master of the instrument of verse; yet the same quali- 
ties appear in his work of both kinds, and as the ex- 
cellence of his prose lies in the perfect turn of short 
sentences and in brief passages of eloquence, so the 
excellence of his verse lies in couplets and quatrains 
and brief passages of description or feeling. He owes 
much in both kinds to his quotability, or the power 
with which his thought in its best and most condensed 
expression sinks into the mind and haunts the mem- 
ory. He was indifferent to the technical part of verse, 
but this was because of an incapacity or lack of gift 
for it ; he was not careless, and his verse was brooded 
over, turned in his mind and rewrought in his study, 
and what he published was generally the last and long 
deferred result of such power of expression as he was 
capable of ; he was inartistic by necessity. He had 
no constructive, but only an ejaculatory, genius ; and 
all that belongs to construction and depends upon it, 
such as dramatic power, for example, he was deficient in. 
His verse on the prosaic level of simple observation is 
descriptive, and becomes lyrical when melted by ten- 
derness of feeling or set aglow by patriotic fervour or 

158 



chap, v.] THE POEMS 159 

fired and expanded by a philosophical thought. The 
movement is, on the lowest plane, often Vvbrdswor- 
thian, and in the lesser odes has the fall and termi- 
nal slides of the eighteenth century, and at the highest 
is apt to be of the sort that is best called runic. The 
technical quality of it is immaterial, and should be 
neglected and forgotten, so far as possible ; its value 
lies in its original power of genius and owes little to 
the forms. The matter itself is often dark and even 
unintelligible without a previous understanding of the 
thought which is the key to the meaning ; and this key 
must be sought in the Essays. 

The Poems are a more brief and condensed form of 
the Essays, in many respects a far finer form, and for 
that reason they appeal less broadly to men. The 
thought gains in brilliancy and external beauty by 
being given under the forms of imagination ; and be- 
sides this it is mixed in the poems with Emerson's 
personality in a more intimate and familiar way, and 
is blended with his daily life and human concerns. 
The Poems are autobiography in a very strict sense. 
Here, in verse, Emerson was most free ; he did not 
consult his audience at all, as in prose he was more or 
less bound to do, and he was really not aware of any 
audience, but wrote purely to please himself. He was 
the very type of a private man at heart, and always 
mixed with the world under protest and by the strict 
compulsion of life. He would have preferred to re- 
main in his garden and the adjoining fields and woods, 
to live with nature and to the soul, and let the world 
go by. He managed his life so as to command much 
leisure of this sort, to be a vagabond of the day with 
the plants and birds, the woods and quiet streams, the 



160 KALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

sky and the distant mountain, and to come home laden 
with natural thoughts as a bee with honey, or laden 
only with the peace of his own soul. He spent much 
time in this loitering and revery and apparent empti- 
ness of mind, happy with the heat and the quiet and 
the bloom of things, or pleased with the snowy silence 
under the winter pines ; and the Poems are the fruit 
of this long leisure, slowly matured from the sponta- 
neous germs but tended with all a poet's love for his 
own. As has been noticed he had formed an ideal 
poet, who stood for this poet in him, another and 
higher self, and named him Osman, and quoted from 
him in his prose ; but in his verse he was that poet, 
and gave him other names there ; and this self, secret 
and private and most dear to him, whose life was that 
of the roamer of nature, is the bard who uses the 
wind, the pine tree, and Monadnock, snowstorm and 
seashore, the chemic heat and the solar blaze, as the 
strings of his lyre. 

He was a poet of both the soul and Nature, but in 
his verse Nature enters more largely and for its own 
sake. Even in his prose no passages are more felici- 
tous or more sweetly abide in the memory than his 
incidental description of landscape or the weather. 
The weather was always interesting to him, and some 
of his happiest lines contain no more than the qualities 
of the atmosphere. His senses were deeply engaged 
with the visible and audible world. He was a minute 
observer, and loved Nature in detail, one might almost 
say without selection at all. The " turtle proud with his 
golden spots " is as dear as a nightingale to him. This 
gives that homely quality to his local description which 
is a large part of its power to please and to cling to the 



v.] THE POEMS 161 

mind. In marking the traits of the spring he notices 
the footprint left in thawing ground and the loosened 
pebble that " asks of the urchin to be tost" ; and in the 
lament for the death of his little boy he recalls the 
painted sled, the " ominous hole he dug in the sand/"' 
the poultry yard, the shed, the wicker wagon frame that 
needed mending ; by such everyday and prosaic detail 
he arrives at a truth of rendering that is invaluable 
to him in describing the New England scene. This 
quality tells, especially, in all that portion of his verse 
which is in low relief, and in the simplest and easily 
intelligible poems such as the fable of the squirrel and 
the anecdote of the titmouse ; and by it he is quite the 
equal of Whittier for local colour and of Thomson for 
general truth to the actual features of a near scene. 
In this sort of description he keeps near the ground 
and loves veracity and enjoys the thing he sees, and 
imagination seldom enters to touch or transform the ob- 
ject of sense ; but if it does so enter, it appears in an 
original and surprising way, of which there is no better 
instance than the following transformation of the phe- 
nomenon of the gradual lengthening of the days as 
spring comes on : — 



" I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth, 
Stepping daily onward north 
To greet staid ancient cavaliers 
Filing single in stately train. 
And who, and who are the travellers ? 
They were Night and Day, and Day and Night, 
Pilgrims wight with step forthright. 
I saw the Days deformed and low, 
Short and bent by cold and snow ; 
The merry Spring threw wreaths on them, 
Flower-wreaths gay with bud and bell ; 

M 



162 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

Many a flower and many a gem, 

They were refreshed by the smell, 

They shook the snow from hats and shoon, 

They put their April raiment on ; 

And those eternal forms, 

Unhurt by a thousand storms, 

Shot up to the height of the sky again, 

And danced as merrily as young men." 

Imagination with Emerson usually is set in motion 
by some philosophic thought or by the presence of 
something elemental in the scene. His mind ex- 
pands with the greatness of what is before him, and 
reaches a loftier height even when he is still in the 
region of description, as, for example, in the Snow 
Storm, equally admirable as a picture of human home 
and of the wild grandeur of Nature ; but the best 
instance of imaginative description on a grand scale 
is the Sea Shore, in which a noble eloquence, which 
was born in prose and is more often to be found there 
as it might be in Hooker or More, has taken eagle's 
wings to itself and soars with swift circles each higher 
by a flight. It is a sublime passage, and has scrip- 
tural quality, and the English poems that can be so 
described are numbered on the fingers of one hand; 
it is so biblical that it seems more like prose than 
verse. To give a loose to his genius in this way 
Emerson requires the amplest sphere, the scenery of 
space, and the stage of long-lapsing time. A good 
example in the purely physical sphere is the image 
of the earth swimming in space, of which he was 
fond: — 

"this round, sky-cleaving boat 
Which never strains its rocky beams ; 
Whose timbers, as they silent float, 
Alps and Caucasus uprear, 



v.] THE POEMS 163 

And the long Alleghanies here, 
And all town-sprinkled lands that be, 
Sailing through stars with all their history." 

Nature as an element, however, is more apt to take 
on the atomic form in this verse and to be chemistr}^ 
Emerson always thinks of the process of Nature as a 
dance of atoms, and he reduces to the same image all 
her matings and pairings, her correspondences and flow 
under every aspect, and sees the sphere in all its parts 
as rhythmical movement, and tune, and rhyme, as if 
the stars still sang together as at creation and the 
life of the universe were a Bacchic dance. He con- 
ceives the energy of Nature as a Dionysiac force, 
with overflow and intoxication in it, and his imagina- 
tive symbols for it are all of this order. This incor- 
poration of the atomic theory in his thought of the 
world, and also the large prominence he gives to the 
idea of evolution in general, and his use of scientific 
terms of detail, give to his poetry a characteristic tone 
and colour sympathetic with the age. Science, indeed, 
may be said to enter into the surfaces and imagery of 
his poetry as an integral part ; few poets have used it 
so much or so organically in their verse, or so coloured 
their minds with it ; but it is the spectacle and not the 
reason of science which is thus used. The mazy dance 
and Bacchanalia of Nature, however, do not yield to the 
verse such elements of beauty and charm as are found 
in her ordinary aspect of " the painted vicissitude " of 
the soul. The scenes of pastoral interwoven in Wood- 
Notes and May-Day have both poetical sweetness and 
the wild flavour of Indian temperament that befits 
them in fresh American verse still near to the forest 
primeval. A grave classic beauty belongs to some of 



164 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

the single images flashed suddenly out, such as that 
supreme one, — 

" tenderly the haughty day 
Fills his blue urn with fire." 

At the other extreme is Hamatreya, in which the 
melancholy of the Earth-might and the shadow of the 
grave over life is caught in the old race mood of our 
blood ; no poem is more purely Saxon in feeling and in 
the fall of the short runic lines; they might have 
been written in the eighth century, so true they ring. 
Occasionally Nature is used as a pure symbol, of 
which the happiest instance is Two Rivers, admirable 
for the harmonizing of the unseen river of the eye 
with the river of the senses, so that the stream of 
eternity seems but the immortalization of the stream 
of the meadows, and to flow as it were out of it. The 
best are those in which the subject is confined to 
simple Nature and the thought flowing out of it 
simply, of which the type is The Rhodora. 

In a second group stand the poems of feeling both 
personal and patriotic. The first section of these 
consists of the love poems, simple and sweet and 
quite natural, such as To Ellen in the South, the 
poems that have for their motive Emerson's personal 
habits and ways, such as My Garden, Good-by, Tlie 
Apology, with which may be classed also Terminus, 
and lastly the poems of lament for his son and his 
brothers. These are all plain reading, and in the 
poems of bereavement there is the greatest intimacy 
that he ever allowed his readers with his private life. 
He was fond of children, in a gentle and fatherly way ; 
but the quality of his fondness would not be known 



v.] THE POEMS 165 

without the Tlirenody, in which the home-life of the 
boy, the child in the house, is so pathetically set forth 
with sad insistence on little things and the day's 
common history, while the father's grief and question 
are so tenderly expressed. In the second part the poem 
becomes philosophical, and has the interest of showing 
what comfort Emerson found in his divine theory 
before the actual presence and under the pressure 
of the sharpest trial of impersonal religion, and in 
what spirit he met it and was freed from it. Of the 
passages that refer to his brothers, TJie Dirge is the poem 
by which they are remembered, and among English 
household poems it excels in reality of affection, in 
domestic beauty, and in simpleness ; it has the tones of 
his voice in it. The patriotic poems have enthusiasm 
in a high degree and are especially rich in great single 
lines and apothegms, like nuggets, which have been 
caught up by the people and will long be memorable. 
The dicta belong to the old spirit of the plain democ- 
racy of New England, they still feel the ardour of the 
Revolution, and most of them fall within the sphere 
of the rights of man ; these poems, nevertheless, are 
local rather than national, and are the fruit of Concord 
and Boston, whose memories and ideals they apply to 
the times and questions of the Civil War. They are 
entirely intelligible in themselves and require no 
comment. With them belongs the hymn which has 
been adopted into church services and expresses the 
old New England feeling for the congregational meet- 
ing-house with words in which all, without distinction 
of sect or creed, can join. 

The philosophical section of Emerson's poems is the 
larger and the characteristic part, though it is that 



166 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

which, offers the greatest obstruction to his general 
acceptance ; both the matter and the mode are too 
lofty for the ordinary reader, but to him who finds in 
them an appeal they yield a nobility and beauty and a 
certain glory, as of the largeness and brightness of 
Nature herself, such as he will not find elsewhere. 
The poems which are most exclusively philosophical 
and bare in sentiment, such as the lines often prefixed 
to particular essays and designated Elements, are the 
least interesting ; next to these are the poems each of 
which is devoted to some one idea of his philosophy such 
as Xenophanes, Guy, Astrcea, To Rhea, Initial, Daemonic, 
and Celestial Love, and a few others, which are intelli- 
gible only by the key of the Essays and are seldom 
poetically successful. The philosophy becomes poeti- 
cal in proportion as personality and the actual scene 
of Nature enter into it as imagery and solving powers, 
and as the ideas are stated less in an intellectual and 
definite, more in a living and suggestive way. The 
element of autobiography, especially, adds force and 
interest. Of the poems where Emerson is himself 
most present, the Ode to Beauty is among the first, and 
best presents him as a lover of beauty with a truth 
that makes the phrase apply to him as rightfully as to 
Keats, however less rich was his sense of beauty and 
however poor he was in the passion for beauty. Give 
all to Love is a companion piece and full of individual- 
ity. The most interesting and characteristic in their 
peculiarity are the two in which he elaborates by 
imagery his doctrine of experience, of the thirst for 
all natures that he may pass through them as if in an 
Indian transmigration, and draw from Nature the whole 
of her being and the meaning of all life, becoming one 



v.] THE POEMS 167 

with the infinite diversity of all, — Mithridates and 
Bacchus, The last is, perhaps, his most original poem, 
and is a marvellous parable of the wine of being, 
equal in universality to the stream of the Two Rivers 
and far excelling the latter in imaginative grasp and 
compass ; it is distinguished, too, for its enthusiasm, 
an example of the " mania" that Emerson counselled as 
the mood of life, and showing an unsuspected power of 
abandonment in himself. 

This doctrine of experience, it should be observed, 
here definitely includes all sorts of experience, and with 
it should be joined the idea that evil itself is a dis- 
cipline in good and can work no final harm, — one of 
the most difficult of doctrines for Emerson's disciples. 
This is the "knowledge" of Uriel. Uriel was a name 
for himself, and the fable of the poem refers to the 
time of his Divinity School Address. The special ex- 
pression is in the quatrain : — 

" Line in nature is not found ; 
Unit and universe are round ; 
In vain produced, all rays return ; 
Evil will bless, and ice will burn." 

It is echoed in The Park : — 

" Yet spake yon purple mountain, 
Yet said yon ancient wood, 
That Night or Day, that Love or Crime, 
Leads all souls to the Good." 

It rests on the basis of the philosophy of Identity, 
of which Bramah is the poetical text, a poem rightly 
selected by the popular instinct as the quintessence of 
Emerson, that which is most peculiarly his own. In 
that cryptic expression, as in a divine cypher, he has 



168 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

condensed all he knows ; the rest of his writings are 
only its laborious commentary and explanation. 

Most personal, too, are the admirable poems on the 
poet and his art, Merlin and Saadi, both other names 
for himself. Such a theory of life as he held more 
appropriately finds a career in poetical inspiration and 
enthusiasm than elsewhere, and seems more true there. 
In both these poems he repeats the counsels of freedom, 
self-reliance, privacy, spontaneity, joyfulness, surprise, 
and ease, and the blessedness of poverty, which are 
found scattered less effectively throughout his works. 
In one the Saxon strength, in the other the Oriental 
colour, bring into play the two most effective literary 
traditions to which he was under obligation, and afford 
that distance of artistic atmosphere which is so often 
an element in romantic charm ; Hafiz is in his poetry 
what Plotinus is in his prose, a far horizon line, which 
helps to give that suggestion of eternity in his thought, 
of universality in his truth, which characterize his 
writing. He seems always to use the iron pen. In 
Saadi he wears the Persian poet's guise, and in Merlin 
the old harper's, and imposes the illusion on the mind 
as when he makes the pine wood and Monadnock speak ; 
and it is always the same voice. He knew as little of 
Persian as he knew of Buddhism ; but his half know- 
ledge gave to literature Saadi in one case and Bramah 
in the other, and this is more than the learning of all 
others has yet accomplished for poetry. In the ideal of 
the poet here set forth his personal expression of phi- 
losophy had its most individual form, was most blended 
with himself; in two other poems, TJie Problem and 
Each and All, which contain much personality also, 
the philosophy is rendered in purely poetical ways. 



v.] THE POEMS 169 

The last group is composed of those poems in which 
the philosophy is put forth in a universal statement of 
large comprehension. The leading thought is here of 
the opposition of Nature and man, of the inadequacy 
of the creature of the Universe. Nature is represented 
as the Great Mother and man as her child. The 
burden of the verse is that man is a weakling. His 
state is accounted for by his division from Nature. 
One easily recognizes the doctrine as a phase of the 
general social theory of the eighteenth century most 
associated with the name of Rousseau. But to 
Emerson this is his substitute for sin and the Fall of 
Man; it is not that man has fallen off from God, 
but from Nature. There is a passage in Wood-Notes 
which states the sense clearly : — 

"But thou, poor child ! unbound, unrhymed, 
Whence earnest thou, misplaced, mistimed, 
Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded ? 
Is thy land peeled, thy realm marauded ? 
Who thee divorced, deceived, and left ? 
Thee of thy faith who hath bereft, 
And torn the ensigns from thy brow, 
And sunk the immortal eye so low ? 
Thy cheek too white, thy form too slender, 
Thy gait too slow, thy habits tender 
For royal man ; — they thee confess 
An exile from the wilderness, — 
The hills where health with health agrees, 
And the wise soul expels disease. . . . 
There lives no man of Nature's worth 
In the circle of the earth ; 
And to thine eye the vast skies fall, 
Dire and satirical, 
On clucking hens and prating fools, 
On thieves, on drudges, and on dolls. 
And thou shalt say to the Most High, 
' Godhead ! all this astronomy, 



170 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

And fate and practice and invention, 
Strong art and beautiful pretension, 
This radiant pomp of sun and star, 
Throes that were, and worlds that are, 
Behold ! were in vain and in vain ; — 
It cannot be, — I will look again. 
Surely now will the curtain rise, 
And earth's fit tenant me surprise ; — 
But the curtain doth not rise, 
And Nature has miscarried wholly 
Into failure, into folly. " 

There is a passage to the same effect in Blight. Out 
of this view arises the capital idea of Emerson's poetry, 
the promise of the coming of the ideal man, who shall 
achieve the reconcilement and be himself equal to 
Nature, the purified and perfect soul. It is clearly 
a Messianic idea. The most noble expression of it is 
in the Song of Nature, and the passage though long is 
necessary to exhibit the idea properly : — 

" But he, the man-child glorious, — 
Where tarries he the while ? 
The rainbow shines his harbinger, 
The sunset gleams his smile. 

11 My boreal lights leap upward, 
Forthright my planets roll, 
And still the man-child is not born, 
The summit of the whole. 

" Must time and tide forever run ? 
Will never my winds go sleep in the west ? 
Will never my wheels which whirl the sun 
And satellites have rest ? 

"Too much of donning and doffing, 
Too slow the rainbow fades, 
I weary of my robe of snow, 
My leaves and my cascades ; 



v.] THE POEMS 171 

" I tire of globes and races, 
Too long the game is played ; 
What without him is summer's pomp, 
Or winter's frozen shade ? 

" I travail in pain for him, 
My creatures travail and wait ; 
His couriers come by squadrons. 
He comes not to the gate. 

" Twice I have moulded an image, 
And thrice outstretched my hand, 
Made one of day and one of night 
And one of the salt sea-sand. 

** One in a Judsean manger, 
And one by Avon stream, 
One over against the mouths of Nile, 
And one in the Academe. 

"I moulded kings and saviours, 
And bards o'er kings to rule'; — 
But fell the starry influence short, 
The cup was never full. 

" Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more, 
And mix the bowl again ; 
, Seethe, Fate ! the ancient elements, 
Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace and pain. 

" Let war and trade and creeds and song 
Blend, ripen race on race, 
The sunburnt world a man shall breed 
Of all the zones and countless days." 

The same idea is substantially contained in The 
Sphinx, in which the portrait of man as he is bears 
the same lineaments, and the deliverance is repre- 
sented as the poet's solving of the riddle of Nature by- 
guessing one of her meanings, according to the doc- 
trine of the microcosm which is so constant in the 



172 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

Essays. The poem, which is less difficult than it ap- 
pears, contains many of Emerson's characteristic say- 
ings, and what may be regarded as the most condensed 
of his great affirmations, comprehending like Bramah 
his whole mind — 

"Ask on, thou clothed eternity. 
Time is the false reply." 

The Poems contain so many thoughts by the way, 
so many scattered beauties and felicities, that any 
general view is inadequate to indicate fully their 
value. There is wealth of detail. No expression of 
the subjectivity of Nature equals for refinement and 
sublimation the lines in Monadnock : — 

"And that these gray crags 
Not on crags are hung, 
But beads are of a rosary 
On prayer and music strung." 

The moral dicta, too, that strew the pages, are 
among the most prized of his lines, and some have 
passed into undying permanence ; of them perhaps the 
greatest is the quatrain on duty, " So nigh is gran- 
deur to our dust/' and the one on sacrifice : — 

" 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, 
When for the truth he ought to die." 

And in closing the little volume one remembers, too, 
whole poems left neglected in this sketch ; but among 
the best, Hermione, The Romany Girl, Days, The Bay's 
Mations, Forerunners, each of which has a unique 
and memorable quality and sets forth some view of his 
philosophy in a characteristic way and poetically. 
Emerson's poetry does not make a wide appeal ; it 



v.] THE POEMS 173 

has been for a select audience, and perhaps it may al- 
ways be so; yet to some minds it seems of a higher 
value than his prose. He was more free, more com- 
pletely enfranchised, in poetry. He was farther away 
from his books, from which, however afterward cer- 
tified by intuitions, he did in fact derive his ideas. 
The ideas are old ; nothing is fresh there except the 
play of his mind about the ideas. Indeed, it is an ob- 
vious observation that one difficulty about intuition as 
expounded by Emerson is that it gives out no new ideas, 
but only rubs up old ones and makes them shine in a 
way which after all is still familiar. Emerson is far- 
ther away from his origins of thought when he goes 
into the woods. He is also a more natural man there, 
and leaves the minister, too, well behind him. There 
are many of the poems in which there is no touch of 
clergy. The poems began, too, at the moment of his 
first liberation. He had written verse before, and 
from boyhood had always practised it ; but the lines 
were practically without merit and of no worth to the 
world. When he was thirty -three years old, at the time 
he left the. church, his mind, which up to that moment 
had been slow in unfolding, suddenly matured ; in the 
ten years following he did all his thinking, and it may 
be fairly said that he had no new ideas after he was 
forty years old ; from then on he repeated and rear- 
ranged the old. There were favourable circumstances 
for development in the beginning of this period. The 
taking such a step, decisive and important as it was, 
gave of itself a certain maturity of character ; the 
renewed health with which he returned from abroad 
was a great gain in conditions ; the need he was under 
to justify the step by work outside the church, and 



174 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

the sense he had — and it was great — of the dispar- 
agement of his talents and labours, the ostracism of 
the University and the unfriendliness of the respect- 
able and educated class in the community about him, 
the feeling of being set aside — all this combined to 
stir the energy of his mind to the utmost. He did his 
best writing, Nature, then, and his earlier Addresses 
are in some ways much superior to the Essays in style ; 
they are more fluid, and if more contemporary, they 
are better adapted to readers. 

It was natural that his poetic instinct should share 
this general quickening of his powers and higher level 
of attainment. One circumstance especially favoured 
its development : he was now for the first time in a 
home of his own in the country, with leisure in many 
hours at least, and filled with what was to him the new 
delight of real acquaintance with nature in the fields 
and woods. His poetry suddenly changed its quality 
and became quite another thing from what it had 
been; and concurrently with his development of thought 
on the side of prose, in the same ten years he composed 
this group of poems, giving a very different expression 
to the same ideas and blending with them his own 
life in nature. In this poetic outlet of his genius he 
found a new liberty ; in his prose he was still much 
engaged to his past, and always dragged the chain of 
"the moral sentiment"; here he was free, and his na- 
ture disclosed unsuspected and fundamental vigours, 
and at times even what he would have called daemonic 
power. There is a vehemence, a passion of life, in 
Bacchus that no prose could have clothed. The whole 
world takes on novelty in the verse ; on all natural ob- 
jects there is a lustre as if they were fresh bathed 



v.] THE POEMS 175 

with dew and morning, and there is strange colouring 
in all; not that he is a colour poet; he does not enamel 
his lines as the grass is enamelled with wild flowers ; 
but the verse is pervaded with the indescribable col- 
ouring of mountain sides, and the browns and greens 
of wide country prospects. This lustre of nature is 
one of his prime and characteristic traits. There is, 
too, a singular nakedness of outline as of things seen 
in the clarity of New England air. His philosophy 
even helps him to melt and fuse the scene at other 
times, and gives impressionist effects, transparencies 
of nature, unknown aspects, the stream of the flowing 
azure, the drift of elemental heat over waking lands, 
the insubstantial and dreaming mountain mass: all 
this is natural impressionism in the service of philoso- 
phy. His persons, too, are mythic and heroic, and 
the very names yield up poetry, — Merlin, Xenophanes, 
Bacchus, Uriel, Saadi, Merops, Bramah. The Poems 
are full of surprise, also ; many are original and unique 
in their originality, so that there is no other poem 
of that sort in the world. In the Poems, as a whole, 
there are these great and significant qualities, where the 
theme is most impersonal and abstract ; and, besides, 
about this strange and various rendering of nature, there 
are in the margin, as it were, scenes of human life and 
common days exquisitely plain, tender, and truthful. 
The range is wide, the moods are many ; Saxon and 
Arab blend, the chant of the hammer here, and there 
the Persia of the mind; here poems that are atmos- 
pheric in lustre and purity, and again poems that 
contain the sum of human destiny, — Bramah, the 
Messianic child of Nature, the Sphinx. 

It is futile to make deductions and notice that with 



176 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

all this fine quality there is defect of art and defect of 
taste, the harshness and roughness of the New Eng- 
land land itself, and downright commonplace and dog- 
gerel ; for it is not with deductions that the poems 
please, they either please so that the defects are for- 
gotten, or they please not at all. If one is in an 
artistic mood and cannot lay it off, these poems shall 
seem impossible, — ding-dong and huddle and muddle, 
a blend of the nebulous and the opaque, sweet bells 
jangled out of tune and harsh; but if he follows one 
of Emerson' s wisest counsels, and remembers that to 
fail in appreciation of another is only to surrender 
to one's own limitations and put a term to one's own 
power, then another hour will come when all that seems 
grotesque and so unequal shall take on again majesty 
and mystery and brightness, the fascination of a new, 
strange, and marvellous world, the glow, the charm ; 
and the reader shall, like — 

' ' The lone seaman all the night 
Sail astonished amid stars." 

Such are the two moods in which Emerson is read, 
but there is no mixing of the two. There is some- 
thing of the same doubleness of impression in the 
Essays, but it is there much less radical. And since the 
appreciation of Emerson is largely one of temperament, 
if I may speak personally as perhaps I ought, I own 
that I have little intellectual sympathy with him in 
any way ; but I feel in his work the presence of a great 
mind. His is the only great mind that America has 
produced in literature. His page is as fresh in Japan 
and by the Ganges as in Boston ; and it may well be 
that in the blending of the East and West that must 



v.] THE POEMS 177 

finally come in civilization, the limitations that awaken 
distrust in the Occidental mind may be advantages 
when he is approached from the Oriental slope of 
thought, and his works may prove one of the reconciling 
influences of that larger world. His material is per- 
manent; there will always be men in his stage of men- 
tal culture or, at least, of his religious development ; 
his literary merit is sufficient to secure long life to his 
writings. For these reasons his fame seems perma- 
nent, and with it his broad contact with the minds of 
men. However unconvincing he may be in detail, or 
in his general theory and much of his theoretic counsel, 
he convinces men of his greatness. One has often in 
reading him that feeling of eternity in the thought 
which is the sign royal of greatness. It is in his 
poems that I feel it most, and find there the flower of 
his mind. 



N 



CHAPTEK VI 

TERMINUS 

Soon after the Civil War the vital energy of Emer- 
son began to decline. He was now established in his 
fame. The dubiousness with which he had long been 
regarded, the disparagement of him, had passed away. 
The older generation whom he had most offended was 
gone from the scene. The transcendentalists and the 
abolitionists had ceased from the land, and he was no 
longer encumbered by the ludicrousness of the one or 
the unpopularity of the other. He had been accepted 
into literature as one of the most effective writers of 
his country. It is true that he had founded no school 
and was to leave no disciple ; but he lectured through- 
out the North, and the circulation of his books had 
become important ; it was as a man of letters, rather 
than in any other capacity, that he now held his place. 
The times had changed, too, at Harvard College. The 
University which had so long looked at him with an un- 
favourable eye, though on his side he had continued a 
loyal connection with it by going up to Cambridge at 
its annual occasions of the reassembling of the alumni, 
now recognized its most distinguished son, gave him 
the degree of LL.D., made him an overseer, in which 
capacity he served twelve years, and on the thirtieth 
anniversary of his Phi Beta Kappa Address invited 
him to address the society once more. He had resumed 

178 



chap, vi.] TERMINUS 179 

lecturing, from which he derived his main income 
before the war closed, and in the years following he 
visited the West in winter and spoke every night for 
several weeks together. He published a second col- 
lection of poems, May-Day and Other Pieces, in 1867, 
and a volume of essays, Society and Solitude, in 1870. 
They did not represent new work, but were made out 
of his accumulated writings. His last piece of original 
composition seems to have been the preface to an edi- 
tion of Plutarch published in 1870. • The only fresh 
attempt he made was The Natural History of Intellect. 
Harvard College had invited him to give a course 
there to the students, and he did so in 1870 to a class 
of thirty, and the succeeding year he repeated the 
course. He apparently meant to give a particular 
account of his metaphysics, in accordance with a plan 
that had been many years in his mind ; but he suc- 
ceeded only in making up a new arrangement of 
thoughts from his old store, and he early became 
discouraged and ended the course by readings from 
Oriental and Platonistic writers. The lectures are in- 
teresting only as confirming his incapacity for meta- 
physics. He enjoyed, however, his contact with the 
students, as he was always pleased to associate with 
youth. It was becoming evident to himself that his 
vigour was waning, and signs of the approach of age 
were noticed by his friends. At the close of the lec- 
tures he made a journey to California with a pleas- 
ant party of family friends, and accompanied by his 
daughter, and spent six weeks in seeing the country, 
including the Yosemite, during which he also lectured 
in San Francisco. 

He returned from this trip much refreshed, and 



180 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

lectured as usual in Boston in the fall and spring, 
and later at Amherst College. It was on his return 
from this lecture that a serious misfortune befell him 
in the burning of his house. He was already weak- 
ened, and the shock was severe. A friend gave him 
five thousand dollars, and other friends soon made a 
joint gift of nearly twelve thousand dollars, which, 
after some reluctance, he was persuaded to accept. 
It was thought desirable that he should take a voyage 
while his house was being rebuilt, and he sailed in 
October, 1872, visited London and Paris, and made 
his way by Italy to the Nile, up which he travelled 
as far as Philae. He was, however, little interested 
in the journey and took more pleasure, as always, in 
persons than things, and though the strangeness of 
Egypt and the sight of the ancient monuments pleased 
and entertained him, he was ready at all times to go 
home. He breakfasted with the Khedive, and received 
attention wherever he was ; on the way back he met 
many distinguished men, especially in Paris and in 
England ; and in the latter place he spoke once at the 
Workingmen's College. He arrived home in May and 
was met at the station by the townspeople, who escorted 
him to the new house, where an arch of triumph had 
been erected ; and there he found his study with his 
books and the pictures and keepsakes he cared for in 
their old order, as if they had never been disturbed. 
In the winter he read his Boston poem on the anniver- 
sary of the throwing of the tea into the harbour ; it 
was an old poem and made over for the occasion. In 
1874 he was nominated for the Lord Kectorship of 
Glasgow University, and received five hundred votes 
against seven hundred for Disraeli. In 1875 he was 



vi.] TERMINUS 181 

made an associate member of the French Academy. 
His literary work had been difficult for him, but 
he had published Parnassus, an anthology of his 
favourite pieces, made mainly long before, from 1855 
to 1865. He now received the friendly assistance of 
Mr. J. Elliot Cabot, who helped prepare for the press 
the volume, Letters and Social Aims, published in 1875. 
From this time Mr. Cabot, who afterward wrote the 
family biography, aided him to gather and arrange out 
of old material the new lectures which he still gave 
from time to time. The most unfortunate of these oc- 
casions was his address before the University of Vir- 
ginia in 1876, when he was unable to make his voice 
heard, and the audience began to disregard the speaker, 
and the talk increasing and becoming general, Emerson 
observing the state of affairs brought his lecture to an 
abrupt close. He, however, made no complaint, even 
to his friends. In 1878 he gave his hundredth lecture 
at the Concord Lyceum. He seldom appeared, and 
then often only in a half-private way, in his last years. 
The failure of his powers, which began with a loss of 
memory for words, became more marked ; his mind 
gradually clouded and weakened ; but he was sur- 
rounded with sheltering care and suffered no disturb- 
ance from his failings. He withdrew from society, 
thinking that conversation with one who could con- 
verse so slowly and with difficulty was unfair, and he 
lived with his family and old friends ; yet he would 
sometimes see a new face, especially if the visitor was 
a young man. His life, under these conditions, was 
characterized by unbroken placidity and cheerfulness ; 
he was at ease, happy, and took his short walks or 
watched the play of his grandchildren with an old 



182 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

man's pleasure. Toward the close of his life he re- 
sumed the habit of going to church, as he had always 
liked to have his children go. His last public ap- 
pearances were at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 
when he read a paper on Carlyle in February, 1881, 
and at the Concord School of Philosophy, when he lec- 
tured on Aristocracy, in July of the same year. In 
April, 1882, he took cold and pneumonia developed. 
He died April 27, and three days later, on Sunday, 
amid the general and public mourning of the com- 
munity, he was buried from the old church of his 
fathers in the grove of Sleepy Hollow, near to Haw- 
thorne and Thoreau. 

The one impression left on the mind by this career of 
nearly fourscore years is of the wholeness of the life ; 
it is the same trait that marks his writings ; the whole, 
not the details, counts. It was the life of a New Eng- 
land citizen, interested in public affairs, but not ab- 
sorbed by them ; employed in self-support by long and 
wide lecturing in the country at large for which he 
received an inconsiderable reward, and by writing a 
few books for which he was ill paid, but managing 
with the aid of a small inherited competency to pay 
his way. There were no events in his life, except the 
one decisive step of leaving the church, which brought 
upon him a state of Coventry for a period and devel- 
oped his individual resources by throwing him upon 
them. He became, without seeking, the heresiarch 
of the transcendentalists, who plentifully exemplified 
the biblical theory that wisdom is the foolishness of 
this world ; and later he became an abolitionist who 
under the stress of the John Brown incident and the 
Fugitive Slave Law doubted the uses of the actual 



vi.] TERMINUS 183 

government. He was by the character of the times 
thrown out of sympathy with both church and state, 
and thus found more liberty to develop a non-con- 
formist theory of life. He was at all points a dis- 
senter. Yet, though a preacher, he was not a prose- 
lytizer. He respected the individuality of other men. 
He was indifferent to the practical forms that his ideas 
might take, and watched the efforts going on about 
him with friendly and benevolent eyes, but without 
great interest. He held mankind and their doings in 
but small respect, and reserved his optimism for a 
distant posterity. He spent his life in announcing 
an idea of regeneration. He mixed with the best 
minds of his time in his own country and met many 
of the most distinguished men of Europe and espe- 
cially of England ; he travelled in early and in middle 
manhood ; but he was in no way influenced or moulded 
by travel or by the great men he encountered, and he 
remained entirely home-bred. 

In his personal nature there was a strain of haughti- 
ness that belonged with the formality of his manners 
and his inherited pride, which underlay his inde- 
pendence and was in his blood ; the superiority with 
which he looked upon both society and literature, with 
confident criticism, was allied to this ; and his profes- 
sion as a clergyman and public teacher sustained these 
fundamental qualities in his character. There was no 
lack of tenderness in his heart ; but there was coldness 
in his personal relations with friends and distance in 
his relations with the stranger. He had not the secret 
of companionableness with his equals, and was rather 
a listener than a sharer in talk. Those who were near 
to him, and especially those of his friends who were 



184 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

actively engaged in social reform, found an unsatisfac- 
toriness in him, though their feeling seldom reached 
the point of a practical expression of dissatisfaction. 
He had the power to impose respect for himself under 
all circumstances, and to do so unconsciously. He 
was the more attached to solitude or the privacy of 
two; but he was fond of society, also, and in the 
Saturday Club, which began from the nucleus formed 
about his table at Parker's, he enjoyed the best com- 
panionship of the times, and was there a valued mem- 
ber. The slowness of his temperament was a primary 
fact in his life ; he was slow in all ways : in his motions, 
in his speech, in his mental progress and maturing; 
and his incapacity to mix with the company, to give 
himself in friendship, to enter actively into practical 
affairs except under protest, and then only in the 
Anti-Slavery conflict, is a part of this temperamental 
quality. He was slow to think and slow to write, as 
is shown by his methods. The life with nature in 
the Concord fields and woods harmonized with this 
temperament, and made an environment that appealed 
to him on every side. 

He had nothing of the anchorite, nothing of the 
saint in his composition. In his personality he was 
very close to the soil ; race was stamped upon his 
countenance. It was also in his marrow. There was 
a fund in him, at bottom, of local trait, instinct, and 
habit that can only be called Yankeeism. He was 
a Yankee in the same sense that Lincoln was a 
Westerner. In the anecdotes about him that give 
personal details and little trifles, in his phrases some- 
times, in his general bearing and the character that 
may be called practical as opposed to moral, one sees 



vi.] TERMINUS 185 

these home-bred ways. He was attached to plain 
living, to independence in money matters, to doing 
chores for himself ; he had no patience with any kind 
of "nonsense" in practical things, and liked best the 
bare, old-fashioned ways in which he and his people 
had been bred for generations. " To go without " was 
a shibboleth with him, and no phrase is more charac- 
teristic of what was most honest, proud, and strong 
in the old New England life. When he was old he 
evidently disliked to be taken too much care of, and 
on one of the last nights of his life he insisted on 
taking the firebrands apart and caring for the hearth 
alone as was his custom. To this plain simplicity of 
the old days his refinement and deference gave a strik- 
ing grace; it was like the light on his mobile and 
expressive face with its large, firm features, which is 
the trait that most affected the eyes of those who saw 
and heard him. He showed habitually and to all a 
certain reverence that ennobled them in their own 
eyes, and an expectancy of something from them, 
sincere and shining from his own heart — the courtesy 
so old-fashioned that it seems now, like chivalry, a 
legend of fair manners. He was of the best that 
democracy gave birth to on his native soil, in both his 
solid and his rarer qualities, in his practicality and his 
spirituality, and his home was the type of a plain, 
intellectual, unluxurious home of the people of the 
old time. " No house," he told his children once, " is 
perfect without having a nook where a fugitive slave 
can be safely hidden away"; and in this home were 
many shelters for all the world's poor. He was not 
only a man singularly free from condemnation for 
others, whatever their defects, but he was tender of 



186 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

the unfortunate, the foolish, and the weak. He was 
hospitable not only to guests but to mankind. If his 
influence extends throughout the world, it is but a 
just tribute to his heart. 

The secret of his style is his diction. It may be 
described as seventeenth-century diction, and is de- 
rived from his early familiarity with old English 
writers. It fits both the man, his profession, and the 
quality of his ideas. He obtains by it verbal clear- 
ness, and in the short sentence which he especially 
cultivated he achieves weight and point, which are 
both oratorical qualities. He had also in his earlier 
writings fluidity, not in thought but in eloquence, the 
flow of the orator, for comparatively brief passages ; 
in the Essays this quality is almost lost, owing to the 
way in which these writings were composed by selec- 
tion and rearrangement from more extended composi- 
tions ; the method had its advantages, for condensation 
and brilliancy of detail, but it necessarily forfeited con- 
secutiveness, harmony, and naturalness. The posthu- 
mous publications, made up of uncollected papers and 
extracts from his manuscripts, in successive editions 
of his complete works, add nothing to his reputation, 
though they afford fuller illustrations of his life and 
thought. In style, except in the speeches, they are 
inferior. He had the same defects in prose as in 
verse ; his taste was often at fault in both word and 
phrase, so far as the diction is concerned, and his 
effort for effect in short sentences sometimes betrayed 
him to expressions that are grotesque and result in 
caricature of the thought. He was not a great writer 
in the sense in which Bacon, Montaigne, or Pascal are 
great writers ; but he was a writer with greatness of 



vi.] TERMINUS 187 

mind, just as he was not a great poet, but a poet 
with greatness of imagination. 

He was extremely deficient in the artistic sense. 
With regard to painting and sculpture he had hardly 
more than a rudimentary sense of art, and in this he 
faithfully represented his people among whom men 
with the perception and love of beauty in ideal forms 
were as rare as good men in Sodom. The love of 
beauty has never been an English trait, and is still 
less an American one. The same deficiency in artistic 
sense made him indifferent to the larger part of litera- 
ture in general, especially to the classic and highly 
refined forms of it. He exhibited that trait of ro- 
manticism which sought out the primitive and the 
distant and brought into repute the early monuments 
of the Norse and Oriental novelties ; he read with 
delight Anglo-Saxon and early English verse, and the 
German translations of Persian poets. He was, never- 
theless, far from being catholic in his tastes, but was 
narrowly bound in the limits of his early reading be- 
yond which in pure literature he seldom ventured ; he 
cared nothing for the French or the Italian genius, in 
which aesthetic qualities predominate, and his attach- 
ment to the ancient classic poets was weak. The 
startling sentence, — " Perhaps Homer and Milton 
will be tin pans yet," — foolish as it is, is nevertheless 
one that rains judgment upon the sayer. With so 
imperfect a hold on the qualities that make for per- 
manence in literature, with so narrow a sympathy for 
the fair forms of the art, with such indifference to 
beauty in artistic embodiment and to the ways and 
means by which ideal expression is obtained, it was 
impossible that he should achieve more than a limited 



188 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

and partial success as a writer, so far as the form of 
his work is concerned. 

The substance of his writings has been already pre- 
sented, with no more critical suggestion than was 
necessary to define it, and in as colourless a manner 
as was possible. It is proper to add here one or 
two general considerations. It is quite true that his 
writings, like his life, make their impression by their 
wholeness and not by their detail. In the individual, 
character is above truth, and more often than 
reason determines the opinions of the man; so here 
the character of Emerson's works is above their 
intellectual contents, and exerts an influence inde- 
pendent of the ideas which are embodied in them. 
His books are full of personal ascendency. It is 
nevertheless desirable that the character of such an 
ascendency, especially if as in this case it is moral, 
should be plainly marked in order that it may prevail 
only in its proper sphere. It is obvious that Emerson's 
limitations are fundamentally important ; they lie at 
the base, and in the very origin and conception of his 
works, which are largely determined in character by 
them. The first and most important general consid- 
eration with respect to him is his blindness to the life 
of humanity in the race. It may be that human fac- 
ulty in the individual is, as he said, not progressive 
in time, that is, that individual power of intellect, for 
example, is not greater now than in the Greek ages ; 
but it is also true that the efficiency of this power is 
greater than it was because of the accumulation of 
knowledge, the definition of the field of the problem, 
and especially the elaboration of methods in the con- 
duct of the intellect, which time has brought about. 



vi.] TERMINUS 189 

It is also true that society achieves something which 
the individual alone cannot accomplish, and that the 
institutional life of the race is, for civilization, of 
greater importance than individual life, or at least is 
not a negligible thing. Emerson so stated the doc- 
trine of individuality as to deny institutional life. 
He dissolved mankind into its atoms, the private 
person, and so related the private person to God that 
all truth in knowledge and all impulse in action came 
from this divine source. He is sometimes said to have 
employed the theory of evolution ; but his conception 
of evolution was a purely metaphysical one, an unfold- 
ing of the soul in combination with Nature by a spirit- 
ual law. Of the true doctrine of evolution, the modern 
doctrine, as an accumulation of power in time so far 
as it relates to humanity and a temporal process of 
the material universe, Emerson had not the slightest 
idea ; under such a conception half his writings would 
have been impossible. He made a tabula rasa of the 
soul upon which only God should write ; in evolution 
there is no such thing as a tabula rasa. He first 
isolated the soul and deprived it of all ancestral 
benefit; and then he left it to Intuition and Impulse, 
mystically conceived, for all knowledge and guidance. 
What the primitive mind thought of as characteristic 
of the prophet, he extended to all the tribe ; this illu- 
minism is one of the earliest of old-world ideas, and 
had its place in religious development ; but now it is 
little better than an atavistic survival. It involves 
contempt for experience as the guide of life. Em- 
erson, in this spirit, slighted history, science, art and 
letters, and religion, the entire recorded life of the 
race ; but civilization is an inheritance, a gift of the 



190 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

past to man, and the individual adds but little to it 
even by the best faculty and fortune. In setting up 
the doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual in the 
form which he employed, he put himself in contra- 
diction to the evolutionary conception of humanity at 
every point. He had a mind compact of miracle, and 
intellectually he belongs in the age of miracle and not 
of science. 

The second general consideration relates to that 
misprision of the human faculties which has already 
jeen alluded to, as integral in his thought. He put the 
law of impulse in the place of the will, and the state of 
ecstasy as its climax in the place of reason and judg- 
ment. He was, however, saved from the consequences 
of the doctrine; and just as, when philosophical ideal- 
ism became inconvenient to|him, he retired to the or- 
dinary and everyday view of Nature, since he had no 
real grasp on metaphysics, so when it came to the touch- 
stone of common action he contented himself with giv- 
ing admirable Baconian counsels based on the necessity 
of accepting practical conditions and living in the world 
as it is. He says in one place that we have almost 
a total inexperience of ecstasy as a rule of life ; at 
all events, it seems to have been to him more a dream 
of the mind, like a millennial hope, than a practical 
mode of living. He had great powers of practical 
compromise with actuality in the present world, and 
the extremes of his theory are held in check by 
his general prudence ; it is only when the conditions 
are wholly ideal that he rises to paradox and affronts 
the common sense of men. In the case of the intel- 
lect, he discredited the reasoning and logical faculties 
from the beginning, and followed in this a private 



vi.] TERMINUS 191 

idiosyncrasy. It was consonant, however, with his 
distrust of science. This was based, nevertheless, on 
a different ground, and really proceeded from his 
belief that the chief end of the study of Nature was 
not to formulate the laws of phenomena, but to make 
phenomena render up the moral laws which they con- 
tained as in a cryptogram. He was possessed with 
this conception of Nature. It belougs, like illuminism 
and ecstasy, to a primitive stage, of the human mind, 
though like these it constantly reappears in the world. 
His objection to science was only that it did not make 
moral philosophy its end. On the other hand, he was 
much impressed by the mechanical inventions and the 
scientific theories of his time. In the third place, with 
regard to the heart, his theory of love has for its 
central idea the progress from a love of persons to a 
love of God known impersonally in the abstractions 
of Truth, Beauty, and Virtue, and this carried as a 
consequence his depreciation of the personal side of 
love and his rule that one can love only what is supe- 
rior. This part of his thought seems to have the least 
reality, to be more purely theoretic, than anything 
else except his doctrine of ecstasy. It must be ob- 
served, however, that it is in opposition to the drift 
of humanity in the ideal of love, which crowns as its 
noblest form the love of the higher for the lower that 
in its climax and consummation results in the sacrifice 
of the higher for the lower. This is the ideal of Chris- 
tian love, and in its modern expansion and application 
in humanitarianism it retains the features of Christian 
tradition; in the thoughts of civilized men to-day 
throughout the world the love of inferiors is the chief 
grace of a noble mind. The criticism, however, is not 



192 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

to be unduly pressed, because here, as in other parts of 
his doctrine, Emerson's practice pleads against his 
words. It must be allowed, also, that with regard to the 
part of the will and of impulse in life his views suggest 
the primacy of the unconscious in life, and are so far 
sympathetic with the study of the unconscious which 
has been so leading a subject in the investigation and 
speculation of the philosophy of the last century. 

In the field of religion the power of Emerson seems 
to lie in the fact that he confirms, as it were, the 
mystical moments that visit the soul and gives to 
them a divine sanction. All men have such moments 
in which they are in the presence of an unknown ele- 
ment in human destiny and are subject to feeling of 
which they can make no analysis and whose meaning 
they cannot read. Such moments are touched with 
emotion, according to their origin and the character 
of the individual, through all the range from sublimity 
to terror ; they are moments of conviction. In gen- 
eral, religion is the key which men apply to them, and 
all religions make great use of them both for faith 
and discipline ; the association of religion with these 
moments is the main support of all faiths. It is to 
be recollected that in Emerson's case he was placed 
by birth and breeding in a community where religion 
had been gradually drying up in its sources. Unita- 
rianism had already given over a considerable part of 
the ordinary Christian faith, and especially that por- 
tion in which emotion most resides, the person and 
authority of Christ. He required, therefore, a new 
means of emotion, if he was to retain his religious life. 
He found this means in metaphysical ideas, which 
allowed him to certify his religious states of mind as 



vi.] TERMINUS 193 

divine, precisely as a pagan might have done without 
Christianity. There were others besides himself in 
the same predicament, and since that time there have 
been many thousands whose religious nature has been 
without guidance or authority, and at a loss ; but the 
mystical moments that come to all men still visit 
them ; and in Emerson's writings such persons have 
found a confirmation of their experience, a spiritual 
interpretation of it which does not have its value in 
the mode of explanation, but in the mere affirmation 
that the experience is divine. The reader does not 
further inquire into the reasonableness of the doctrine ; 
he has found the gospel that serves him, and he treats 
its enigmas, mysteries, and obscurities as other reli- 
gious people treat the blind passages and transcendent 
truths in their own creeds. All religion has a ten- 
dency to prevail by putting the mind to sleep. The 
important thing is to be assured of the divine and 
infinite nature of the soul and to have an account of 
the soul's personal experience of the human mystery 
in itself or in the face of the world at large. Emerson 
provides all this with the sincerity and conviction, 
the eloquence and enthusiasm, the authority, too, of a 
great moral preacher. He is the priest of those who 
have gone out of the church, but who must yet retain 
some emotional religious life, some fragment of the 
ancient heavens, some literary expression of the feel- 
ing of the divine. It is because of the multitude of 
such minds under modern conditions that his Essays 
have had so broad and profound an influence, and the 
tenderness and veneration with which his memory is 
widely regarded are due to the peculiarly intimate 
and personally precious service which he has rendered. 



194 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

A second source of his power is the vigour with 
which he has stood for individuality. Self-reliance 
on his lips is a clarion call. He has the advantage, 
also, of exemplifying the cause in his own person. 
The absoluteness with which he cut all moorings ex- 
cites the mind. It is true that it is in the principle 
of authority that progress stops; life petrifies there. 
In church or state or books, tradition is the power 
that binds ; experiment is the power that looses. Men 
are, in general, willing enough to experiment, but 
they are afraid. He vivifies them. Energy in life is 
what he most values ; and energy certified by success. 
He has little to say of resignation and sacrifice. The rule 
of useful life seems to him to be the other way, — indus- 
try, self-assertion, effort for the prize of life ; and he 
values these prizes, which in his broad terms are aristoc- 
racy and property, and he is content that those who win 
them should have them. The practical instincts of 
men respond to this sure touch ; in worldly wisdom 
and the cunning of goods he has sagacity, and he has 
observed the course of human events, where and how 
property goes and into what hands. It is as a proof 
of energy that he values it and all other titles of 
success. The secret of a man's power is to use greater 
power, turning its channels through himself ; charac- 
ter is the greatest personal power, and it is moral — it 
is moral power funded. Moral power indicated by 
material success is his reading of the practical ideal. 
He is sound, too, in his democracy ; equal rights and 
equal opportunities, a fair field, wealth measured by 
toil, liberty, and a principle of protection that shall 
grow stronger in proportion to the weakness of the 
individual and his necessity for succour or defence, — 



vi.] TERMINUS 195 

these are his principles, and more manifest in the 
spirit of his writings than any particular expression. 
He was closer to the soil in his democracy, nearer to 
the plain people of the country, than any other man of 
letters ; and in his works he embodied more vitally 
the practical ideal of the American, industrious, suc- 
cessful, self-reliant, not embarrassed by the past, not 
disturbed by the future, confident, not afraid. If the 
actual state of affairs discouraged him, he never 
doubted of the issue ; as time went on, his optimism 
as to his country increased, and he saw in it the vast 
home of labouring men, free and well-intentioned, with 
power to hold in their own hands the experiment of 
democracy in which their welfare is the chief factor. 
The fortune of the republic was for him not accumu- 
lated wealth but widespread welfare. He was by 
birth a patriot, by tradition a Puritan democrat, and 
these views were natural to him. His Americanism 
undoubtedly endears him to his countrymen. But 
it is not within narrow limits of political or 
worldly wisdom that his influence and teachings have 
their effect; but in the invigoration of the personal 
life with which his pages are electric. No man rises 
from reading him without feeling more unshackled. 
To obey one's disposition is a broad charter, and 
sends the soul to sail all seas. The discontented, the 
troubled in conscience, the revolutionary spirits of 
all lands, are his pensioners ; the seed of their thoughts 
is here, and also the spirit that strengthens them in 
lonely toils, and perhaps in desperate tasks, for the 
wind of the world blows such winged seed into far 
and strange places. It is not by intellectual light but 
by this immense moral force that his genius works 



196 RALPH WALDO EMERSON [chap. 

in the world. He was so great because he embodied 
the American spirit in his works and was himself a 
plain and shining example of it ; and an American 
knows not whether to revere more the simple man- 
hood of his personal life in his home and in the 
world, or that spiritual light which shines from him, 
and of which the radiance flowed from him even in 
life. That light all men who knew him saw as 
plainly as Carlyle when he watched him go up the 
hill at Craigenputtock and disappear over the crest 
" like an angel." 

His inspiring power, in religion to many and in 
practical life to many more, has long been recognized 
as the substance of his influence and fame. The 
intellectual part with which it is associated has 
always been more in question ; but the reader, from 
whom it is for the most part veiled, leaves the doubtful 
ideas and takes in full measure the spirit that enfran- 
chises and strengthens and makes him not to be afraid ; 
and it is to be hoped that he may imbibe a portion 
also of Emerson's sense of the actual as a governing 
if unwelcome element in life and a corrective of all 
theory ; for after all, revolutionary power is the best 
of Emerson's gifts. If in this account which has 
here been given there is much limitation, it proceeds 
from a desire to arrive at the truth about him in his 
own spirit by one who, the familiar lover of his 
pages from boyhood, has by many repeated readings 
through years winnowed this meaning from them. 
He was exclusively a man of religion; his other 
thought is a corollary from his religious premises. 
It belongs to primary honesty, therefore, to say that 
he was not a Christian in any proper use of the 



vi.] TEKMINUS 197 

word; it is a cardinal fact in considering his rela- 
tion to the religious changes of the time ; rather he 
was a link in the de-Christianization of the world in 
laying off the vesture of old religion ; but it is plain 
that no modern mind can abide in his ideas. They 
were the tent where the Spirit rested for a night, 
and is now gone ; and who can forecast the ways of 
the Spirit ? To those who live in the spirit, he will 
long be, as Arnold said, the friend ; to the young 
and courageous he will be an elder brother in the v*" 
tasks of life ; and in whatever land he is read he will 
be the herald and attendant of change, the son and 
father of Revolution. 



INDEX 



Academy, French, associate 
membership in, 180-181. 

Adams, Abel, 85, 93. 

Albee, Mr., 96. 

Alcott, A. Bronson, 52, 78, 86, 
89, 94, 95. 

, Mrs., 94. 

, Louisa M., 80-81 . 

American Scholar, The, ad- 
dress, 52. 

Amherst College lecture, 180. 

Ancient and Honorable Artil- 
lery, 4. 

Anti-Slavery question, 70-74. 

Apology, The, poem, 164. 

" Apostles of the Newness," 53. 

Aristocracy, lecture, 182. 

Aristophanes, opinion of, 86. 

Astrcea, poem,' 166. 

Atlantic Monthly, The, contri- 
butions to, 106. 

Austen, Jane, 86. 

B 

Bacchus, poem, 167, 174. 
Baucroft, George, 103. 
Blight, poem, 170. 
Book Club, the, 17. 
Boston Hymn, the, 105. 
Bowdoin prize, Harvard, 16. 
Boylston prize, Harvard, 16. 
Bramah, poem, 83, 167, 172. 



Brook Farm, 68-70. 
Brown, John, 72-73. 
Bulkeley, Peter, 4. 
Burke, lecture, 41. 
Burns Centenary address, 77- 
78. 

C 

Cabot, J. Elliot, 34-35, 86, 181. 
California, trip to, 179. 
Canterbury Lane residence, 

22-23. 
Card-playing, dislike of, 82. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 39, 43, 58, 

66, 68, 85, 97, 100-101, 102, 

103, 106, 108, 196 ; paper on, 

182. 
Channing, Edward Tyrrel, 14. 
, William Ellery, 4, 45, 96- 



97. 

Character of Socrates, The, es- 
say, 16. 

Chardon Street Convention, 
53. 

Cherokees, removal of, 74. 

Children, Emerson and, 80-82, 
95-96, 164-165. 

Christian Science, 154. 

Civil War period, 104-105. 

Clarke, James Freeman, 66-67. 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 103- 
104. 

Coleridge, S. T., 30, 33, 39-40, 
45, 108. 



199 



200 



INDEX 



Concord, life at, 42-43, 64-66, 

80-82, 93-101, 181-183. 
Concord Hymn, the, 41. 
Conduct of Life, The, 105-106. 
Conservative, The, address, 61. 
Conventicle Club, the, 17. 



Dante, opinion of, 86. 

Dartmouth College, address at, 
61. 

Days, poem, 172. 

Day's Bations, The, 172. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 103. 

Dial, TJie, 68, 95, 106. 

Dickens, Charles, 86. 

Dirge, The, poem, 165. 

Discontented Poet : a Masque, 
The, 44. 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 180. 

Divinity School Address, Har- 
vard, 55-56, 67, 105. 

Don Quixote, 86. 

Dorr, classmate, 16. 

E 

Each and All, poem, 168. 
Edinburgh, lectures in, 102. 
Egypt, visit to, 180. 
Elements, prefatory lines, 166. 
Emerson, Bulkeley (brother), 

6, 26. 
, Charles (brother), 6, 26, 

28, 29, 42. 
, Edward (brother), 6, 16, 



21, 26, 28, 33, 40, 42. 
— , Mary (aunt), 3, 7, 8-9, 

14, 24. 
— , Ralph Waldo : birth and 



ancestry, 2-5 ; death of 
father, 5-6 ; brothers, sis- 



ter, and mother, 6-7 ; aunt, 
Miss Mary Emerson, 8-9 ; 
removal of family from Bos- 
ton to Concord, 9-10 ; early 
school-life, 11-13 ; Harvard 
days, 13-18 ; assistant at 
brother William's school for 
young women, 21-22 ; re- 
moval to Canterbury Lane, 
22-23 ; exclusively clerical 
surroundings in early life, 
24-25 ; student at Harvard 
Divinity School, 26-27 ; suf- 
ferings from rheumatism and 
visit to South, 27-28 ; re- 
newal of theological studies, 
28 ; engagement and mar- 
riage to Ellen Louisa Tucker, 
29-30 ; ordained colleague of 
Dr. Ware at Old North 
Church, Boston, 29-30 ; 
trend of mental develop- 
ment, 30-33 ; proposes dis- 
continuance of use of the 
elements in celebrating Com- 
munion, and consequent res- 
ignation, 35-37 ; death of 
wife, 38 ; first journey abroad 
(1831), 38-39; meets Car- 
lyle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
and Landor, 39-40 ; income 
from wife's fortune, 40 ; lec- 
tures during 1833-1835, 41 ; 
Concord Hymn, 41 ; occa- 
sional preaching, especially 
at New Bedford, 41-42 ; set- 
tles permanently at Concord, 
and marries Lydia Jackson, 
42-43 ; varying fates of 
brothers, 42-43 ; helps in- 
troduce Carlyle to American 
readers, 43; poetic side of 



INDEX 



201 



character, 44; intellectually 
a moralist, and a mystic 
devotee, 45 ; attractions of 
transcendentalism, 45-46 ; 
publication of Nature, 48 ; 
analysis and critical consid- 
eration of Nature, 47-51 ; 
delivers Phi Beta Kappa 
Address (1837), 51-52; con- 
nection with the Transcen- 
dentalists, 52-54 ; the Divinity 
School Address (1838), 55- 
56 ; The Method of Nature 
address (1841), 59-61 ; sub- 
sequent addresses and their 
significance, 61-63 ; home 
life in Concord, 64-66 ; the 
Transcendental Club and 
The Dial, 67-68 ; Brook 
Farm, 68-70; the Anti- 
Slavery question, 70-74 ; 
Lowell's description of 
speeches, 75-78 ; N. P. 
Willis's, 78 ; lecturing tours 
in the West, 79-80 ; children 
of, 80 ; fondness for chil- 
dren, 81-82 ; personal ap- 
pearance, 82-83 ; trait of 
humour, 83-84 ; walking, 
shooting, smoking, and busi- 
ness habits, 84-85; reading 
and writing habits, 85-87 ; 
mode of study and composi- 
tion, 88-90 ; friendships, 90- 
97 ; lack of magnetism, 97- 
100 ; as a letter-writer and 
correspondent, 100-101 ; sec- 
ond journey abroad (1847), 
102-104 ; revisits Carlyle and 
meets Leigh Hunt, De Quin- 
cey, and Clough, 103-104 ; 
effect of Civil War on affairs*. 



104 ; visits Washington and 
talks with Lincoln, 105 ; 
works published from 1836 
to 1865, 105-106; examina- 
tion of the Essays, 107 ff. ; 
passage on the nature of the 
soul quoted, 146-147 ; the 
poetic side, 158 ff. ; analysis 
of poems, 161-177 ; beginning 
of decline of vital energy, 
178 ; honours from Harvard, 
178 ; second Phi Beta Kappa 
Address (1867), 178; Cali- 
fornian trip, 179 ; burning 
of home and third journey 
abroad (1872), 180 ; candi- 
dacy for Lord Rectorship of 
Glasgow University, 180 ; 
associate member of French 
Academy, 181 ; later publi- 
cations (Parnassus, Letters 
and Social Aims), 181 ; inci- 
dent of University of Vir- 
ginia address, 181 ; last 
public appearances, and 
death, 182 ; impression left 
by career, and conclusion, 
182-197. 

Emerson, Mrs. Ralph Waldo 
(first wife), 29-30, 38. 

, Mrs. Ralph Waldo (sec- 
ond wife), 42, 66. 

, Waldo (son), 80-81. 

, (son), 78-79, 80, 82. 

, William (grandfather) , 



3-4. 

— , William (father), 4, 5-6. 

— , Mrs. William (mother), 
3, 6, 40, 43, 80. 

— , William (brother), 6, 
13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 25, 27, 
33, 36. 



202 



INDEX 



English Literature, lecture, 41. 

English Traits, 105. 

Essays, 105, 107-157, 174, 186. 

European journey, first (1831), 
38-40; second (1847), 102- 
104 ; third (1872), 180." 

Everett, Edward, 12, 18-21. 

F 

Eire, loss of home by, 180. 
Eirst Parish Church, Boston, 4. 
First Philosophy, the, 109. 
Forerunners, poem, 172. 
Fortus, poem, 11. 
France, visits to, 39, 102-104, 

180 ; Essays known in, 106. 
French literature, 85. 
Friendship, essay, 150. 
Fruitlands experiment, 94. 
Fugitive Slave Law address, 

72, 73. 
Fuller, Margaret, 68, 83, 95, 

97, 98 ; Memoirs of, 106. 
Furness, Dr., 10-11, 83. 

G 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 74. 
Gentleman-farming, 70. 
George Fox, lecture, 41. 
German literature, 85. 
Give All to Love, poem, 166. 
Glasgow, Lord Rectorship of 

University of, 180. 
Goethe, 25, 54, 85. 
Good-by, poem, 164. 
Gourdin, classmate, 16. 
Guy, poem, 166. 



Hafiz, obligations to, 168. 
Hamatreya, poem, 164. 



Harvard College, life as stu- 
dent at, 13-18 ; addresses at, 
51-52, 55, 105, 178 ; classical 
instruction at, 85 ; soldiers 
of, 105 ; recognition and 
honours from, 178, 179. 

Haskins, Ruth. See Emerson, 
Mrs. William (mother). 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 53, 83, 
97-98. 

Hermione, poem, 172. 

Heroism, lecture, 74. 

Hoar, Elizabeth, 93-94. 

Hoar, Samuel, 72. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 90, 
98. 

Hosmer, farmer, 70. 

Hunt, Leigh, 103. 



Initial, Doemonic, and Celestial 

Love, poem, 166. 
Ireland, Alexander, 102. 
Italy, travels in, 39, 180. 
Italy, lecture, 41. 



Jackson, Lydia. See Emerson, 

Mrs. R. W. (second wife). 
James, Henry, Sr., 98. 

K 

Kansas, the arming of settlers 

in, 72. 
Keats, point of analogy to, 166. 
Khedive, breakfast with, 180. 
Kossuth, Louis, 74. 



Landor, Walter Savage, 39-40, 

108. 
Lectures, first, 41 ; in Boston 



INDEX 



203 



and vicinity, 61, 65, 104, 
180, 181 ; on Slavery, 71- 
75; in the West, 79-80, 179 ; 
in Great Britain, 102 ; at 
Harvard College, 179; at 
Amherst College, 180 ; last 
courses of, 181. 

Letters and Social Aims, 181. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 105. 

Literary Ethics, address, 61. 

London, addresses in, 102, 180. 

Longfellow, Henry Wads worth, 
98. 

Love, essay, 150. 

Lowell, James Russell, 51, 53, 
75-78, 98. 

Luther, lecture, 41. 

M 

Man the Beformer, address, 61. 

Martineau, Harriet, 70, 99. 

Massachusetts Historical So- 
ciety paper, 182. 

Massachusetts Quarterly, con- 
nection with, 68. 

May-Day, poem, 163. 

May-Day arid Other Pieces, 179. 

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, 
106. 

Merlin, poem, 168. 

Method of Nature, The, ad- 
dress, 59-61. 

Michael Angelo, lecture, 41. 

Milton, lecture, 41. 

Miscellanies, 105. 

Mithridates, poem, 167. 

Monadnock, poem, 172. 

Montaigne, influence of, 32, 
107-108. 

Monthly Anthology, 5. 

Moody, Father, 4. 



Morley, John, 147. 
Murat, Achille, 28. 
My Garden, poem, 164. 

N 

Natural History of Intellect, 
The, 109, 179. 

Nature, first book, 46-51, 61, 
105, 174. 

New Bedford, sermons at, 41- 
42. 

New Jerusalem Church, 58. 

Newton, residence at, 40. 

Nile, trip up the, 180. 

North American Beview, con- 
tributions to, 106. 

Norton, Dr. Andrews, 56. 

O 

Ode to Beauty, 166. 

Old Manse, the, 10, 28, 42. 

Old North Church, Boston, 

29-30, 35-38, 44. 
Osman, ideal poet, 44, 99-100, 

160. 



Paris, visits to, 39, 104, 180. 
Park, The, poem, 167. 
Parker, Theodore, 104. 
Parnassus, anthology, 181. 
Phi Beta Kappa Address, first 

(1837), 51-52, 105; second 

(1867), 178. 
Phi Beta Kappa poem (1834), 

41. 
Phillips, Wendell, 74. 
Pilgrims to Concord, 98-101. 
Plato, 85. 

Plotinus, influence of, 168. 
Plutarch, 82, 85. 
Poems, 105, 158-177. 



204 



INDEX 



Present State of Ethical Phi- 
losophy, The, essay, 16. 
Problem, The, poem, 168. 
Pythologian Society, the, 17. 



Q 



Quinet, attention of French 
called to Essays by, 106. 



R 



Belation of Man to the Globe, 

The, lecture, 41. 
Ttepresentative Men, 105. 
Bhodora, The, 164. 
Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 9-10, 28, 36, 

42. 
Ripley, George, 67, 69, 70. 
Ripley, Samuel, 14, 27. 
Bomany Girl, The, poem, 172. 



S 



Saadi, poem, 168. 
Sailors' Mission, the, 34. 
San Francisco lecture, 179. 
Sartor Besartus, preface to, 43. 
Saturday Club, the, 184. 
Sea Shore, poem, 162. 
Self-portraiture, Emerson's, 44. 
Shelley, 86. 

Slavery, speeches on, 71-74. 
Snow Storm, poem, 162. 
Society and Solitude, essays, 

179. 
Song of Nature, poem, 170- 

171. 
Sphinx, The, poem, 171. 
Sumner, Charles, 72. 
Swedenborg, mental response 

to, 30. 



Taylor, Father, 34. 
Terminus, poem, 164. 
Tests of Great Men, lecture, 41. 
Thomson, James, 161. 
Thoreau, Henry D., 68, 87, 96- 

97; literary remains of, 106. 
Threnody, poem, 81, 165. 
Ticknor, George, 15. 
Times, The, address, 61. 
To Ellen in the South, poem, 

164. 
To Bhoea, poem, 166. 
Transcendental Club, the, 67. 
Transcendentalism, 44-45, 52- 

53, 150. 
Transcendentalist, The, ad- 
dress, 61. 
Travel, opinions on, 39, 104, 

149, 180. 
Tucker, Ellen Louisa. See 

Emerson, Mrs. R. W. (first 

wife). 
Two Bivers, poem, 164, 167. 

U 

University of Virginia address, 

181. 
Uriel, poem, 167. 



Venice, visit to and opinion of, 
39. 

W 

Waltham, first sermon at, 27 ; 

address at, 72. 
Ware, Rev. Henry, 29-30, 56. 
Washington, lecture in, 105. 



INDEX 



205 



Water, lecture, 41. 
Waterville College, address at, 

59-61. 
Webster, Daniel, 73. 
Whittier, John G., 98, 161. 
Willis, Nathaniel P., 78. 
Wood-Notes, poem, 165, 169. 
Wordsworth, William, 39-40, 

108. 



Xenophanes, poem, 166. 

Y 

Yankeeism, element of, 83-84, 
184. 

Yosemite tour, 179. 

Young American, The ad- 
dress, 61. 



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DE QUINCEY. By David Masson. 

SHERIDAN. By Mrs. Oliphant. 
POPE. By Leslie Stephen. 

JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen. 

GRAY. By Edmund Gosse. 
BACON. By R. W. Church. 

BUNYAN. By J. A. Froude. 

BENTLEY. By R. C Jebb. 



THE MACMLLLAN COMPANY 

64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



Edited by JOHN MORLEY 
Cloth i2mo 40 cents each 



ADDISON. 

By W. J. Courthope. 

BACON. By R. W. Church. 

BENTLEY. By Prof. Jebb. 

BUNYAN. By J. A. Froude. 

BURKE. By John Morley. 

BURNS. By Principal Shairp. 

BYRON. By Prof. Nichol. 

CARLYLE. By Prof. Nichol. 

CHAUCER. 

By Prof. A. W. Ward. 

COLERIDGE. By H. D.Traill. 

COWPER. By Goldwin Smith. 

DEFOE. By W. Minto. 

DE QUINCEY. 

• By Prof. Masson. 

DICKENS. By A. W. Ward. 
DRYDEN. By G. Saintsbury. 

FIELDING. 

By Austin Dobson. 
GIBBON. 

By J. Cotter Morison. 

GOLDSMITH. 

By William Black. 



GRAY. By Edmund Gosse. 
JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen 
HUME. By T. H. Huxley. 
KEATS. By Sidney Colvin. 
LAMB. By Alfred Ainger. 
LANDOR. By Sidney Colvin. 
LOCKE. By Prof. Fowler. 

MACAULAY. 

By J. Cotter Morison. 

MILTON. By Mark Pattison. 
POPE. By Leslie Stephen. 
SCOTT. By R. H. Hutton. 
SHELLEY. ByJ.A. Symonds. 
SHERIDAN. ByMrs.Oliphant. 

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 

By J. A. Symonds. 

SOUTHEY. By Prof. Dowden. 
SPENSER. By R. W. Church. 
STERNE. By H. D. Traill. 
SWIFT. By Leslie Stephen. 
THACKERAY. ByA.Trollope. 

WORDSWORTH. 

By F. W. H. Myers. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York 






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